«Mortal Engines» or the Brutality of Boredom

Cinema Wednesdays - Hélène Lavoyer

After a war that ravaged the earth and turned it into a hostile terrain, mankind lives perched on mobile cities. London, the greediest of them all, survives thanks to the ancient cities on which its engines feed. The populations of these cities are rescued from their conditions of poverty and insalubrity, adopt the London ideology that presents hunting as a game and the destruction of these cities as a victory, and all is well in the best of all possible worlds.

But one day, Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmarsdóttir) tries to assassinate Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), the rich, mean, greedy archaeologist who has «risen above his condition as an ancient city pauper». With the help of Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan), an awkward, over-talking hunk, and the Asian warriors protecting La Muraille, Hester Shaw must now stop Thaddeus before he destroys what's left of the good guys with a canticle-energy weapon, which only she has the key to turn off.

I'm fed up with these catch-all «films», these blockbusters for which marketers set up an entire tent, even though no one has seen them yet, and which are spectacular only in their visual effects but have a script so poor that you can guess in advance not only the pace, but also the dialogue and even the attitude of the characters. Fed up with the stereotype of the oppressed underclass - here embodied in Hester, a woman, to «do it right» - to whom everything happens but who stands firm in the face of the evil bourgeoisie.

Not that the picture is wrong, nor that it's unpleasant to see - at last - on screen Chinese heroines, actors (who, by the way, are inevitably the ones holding the age-old wisdom imbued with messages of peace and love), mestizos, and so on, simply that they are balances là, comme ça, pour faire bien et montrer que «mais si, regardez, on les accepte, on leur donne même des rôles au cinéma!». Mais quels rôles! Ceux de personnages si creux et stéréotypés que l’on ne peut même pas déceler la moindre qualité de l’un ou l’autre des acteurs (quoique Robert Sheehan se donne de la peine pour séduire à la façon de Johnny Depp dans Pirates of the Caribbean, avec un jeu empli de mimiques et d’une gestuelle presque plagiée).

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Photo credit: © Universal Pictures