MORTAL ENGINES (film)

MORTAL ENGINES. MORTAL ENGINES (film). Christian Rivers, director. Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, script, from Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. Peter Jackson, one of three producers, in addition to work on script, and a moving force. Universal Pictures, Media Rights Capital, WingNut Films (production) / Universal Pictures (distribution), 2018.[1]

Wikipedia entry summaries the premise with this:

Following a cataclysmic conflict known as the Sixty Minute War, the remnants of humanity regroup and form mobile cities, called "Traction Cities". Under a philosophy known as "Municipal Darwinism", larger "predator" cities hunt and absorb smaller settlements in the "Great Hunting Ground", which includes Great Britain and Continental Europe. In opposition, settlements of the "Anti-Traction League" have developed an alternative civilization consisting of "static settlements" (traditional, non-mobile cities) in Asia led by Shan Guo (formerly China), protected by the "Shield Wall". Relics of 21st-century technology such as toasters, computers, and smartphones are valued by historians as "Old-Tech."[2]

The film did not do well with most critics or commercially, except for visual effects, but see for its place in the canon of Steampunk and other SF films of the early 21st century. See also:

• for the conceit of moving cities, for which cf. and contrast James Blish's Cities in Flight tetralogy (1955-62) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Terminator city, at the terminator on Mercury, in 2312.[3]

• "a reanimated cyborg known as a 'Stalker'"

• "MEDUSA, a quantum energy-based superweapon used by the belligerents during the Sixty Minute War to instantly destroy entire cities, albeit shattering the Earth's crust into a thousand pieces that have rearranged the former continents."[4]

Film mentioned and contextualized in Meghann Hillier-Broadley's "Predator Cities in the Anthropocene: Reading the Anthropocene in Philip Reeve's Predator Cities Quartet," the first of which is Mortal Engines: SFRA Review #328, which see.

RDE, finishing, 17Sep20