This movie is about confrontations between moving futuristic cities, sometimes a real clash of giants of iron and stone, that provides a more creative action movie than any blockbuster this year in Hollywood.
The story is the stuff from which real nightmares are made, but also a great starting point for science fiction movies. ''Mortal Engines'' is based on a series of youth books dealing with young people born into a horrifying, but fascinating at the same time, post-apocalyptic world.
The background story for the plot is called "The 60 Minutes War". Within one hour in the 21st century, the nations of the world have destroyed each other, and the majority of people and the natural conditions that allow it to exist. The plot itself takes place about 1,000 years later, after the world has undergone a technological, economic and political reform and is composed, among other things, of independent cities.
Unlike the classical days of Greece, the future cities are mobile - they have adapted themselves to a resource-free world with chains that make it possible to move like a huge tank.
This is how we meet at the beginning of the movie London, which runs a wild chase after a small German settlement in order to swallow it as a kind of fuel. They call it "municipal Darwinism".
The 60-minute war eliminated most of the technologies and most of civilization, thus driving humanity into an electric prehistoric era in the spirit of the 19th century.
Mankind combined new technological developments and archaeological discoveries of old technologies. In such a world, an air battle between a hyper-sophisticated plane and an upgraded balloon is commonplace. It's a world where curious engineers and archaeologists have equal potential to achieve technology that will change the rules of the game.
In this respect, "Mortal Engines" is excellent. The world is luxurious and layered, merging past and future, nature and technology, in a spectacular and charming way. The action is rich in images, and in masses of moving parts in every frame that energize the journey. Even when a scene is just a dialogue in a room, the director makes sure to remind us that the room is only a cell in a wonderful machine city that is constantly in motion.
The mobile city also represents a beautiful representation of the British classes who have also returned to a rigid division. It is still a democracy, but one that is based on fighting for survival and therefore its bloodthirsty citizens.
The director created wonderful and fascinating cities, that manage to ignite the imagination. It is not just London - every city and town is an independent state, a small world that is built up to the last detail, rich in cultural and technological history.
