Mortal Engines

[peter]

I once read a science fiction story about Ludvig van Beethoven waking up in modern day [wherever], his mind having been in some way 'downloaded' [or whatever] into the body of a recently deceased accident victim. Nursed back to health, he is put to work composing a new and contemporary 'masterwork' and after months of furious composing and a huge media build-up he strides onto the stage and raises his arms in front of the orchestra and assembled dignitaries from the world of music. Predictably he has written a good piece of music - but it is not the expected work of genius that people have come to see, and our narrator [the man himself] explains that while everything was done to replicate the Maestro down to the last detail, there was one flaw that the preparation could not overcome. No matter how well taught, how long and hard the work put in - the inescapable reality was that the reproduction was not Beethoven, the original. Try as you might, the Genius of the man could never be replicated, no matter how close the copy might be.

The same is, I'm afraid true of Mortal Engines. Produced out of Peter Jackson's Wingnut Studio's, directed by his protoge Christian Rivers - the film has all the hallmarks of a big Jackson filmatic opera, but none of the genius. From the off the film struggles to live up to the big CGI with characters and dialogue that are two-dimensional and a storyline that is yawningly dull. Acted with as much conviction as the second-rate script and story-line allows for, the experience reminds one nevertheless of watching one of those early episodes of Star Trek or Blakes Seven, where the actors run around with forced gusto in sets palpably made of cardboard and flashing lights. The one interesting story arc in the entire film was wasted with the early death of a character that was simply begging to be resuscitated for the final denoument - but was failed to be so, and even the promised kiss between the two leads that might have sugared the weak and forgettable ending, was denied us.

All in all this was thin fare for an acknowledged Master of the art of film-making to be associated with - one can only assume that he was more interested in working on the brilliant WW1 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old that came out shortly before, than keeping an eye on what his less talented student was up to in the Director's Chair.

C'mon Wingnut - you can do better than this and you've got some serious ground to make up in order to prevent yourself slipping down into the ranks of the bog-standard studios churning out movies for the meat-grinder mass-market fodder.

[Small note; Interesting that the good guy peace-makers in this movie were the from Asian end of the world [and of distinctly far-eastern appearance nationality]; a nod to the ever increasing Chinese market for films and capital investment therein I'm thinking. Gone are the days of Odd-Job and the archetypal 'Chinese Villain'; Now it's our {the Brit's} turn! ]