Sean Creaven

This movie was a surprise. Nothing to fault it apart from towards the end where the plot basically unravels! This was full of holes. (1) Since the EPM was disabled Boston was supposed to fall. There would be a killing spree. But if Boston had fallen how were our heroes (mother and father with baby clasped to the breast) able to get to the jetty to try and catch the boat to South Korea without an android in sight? And how was a later military withdrawal from Boston (also unmolested) possible? (2) Before that how on earth did all of those androids get into Boston? This was before the EPM was switched off. But switching off the EPM was supposed to be the act that would breach Boston's defences. And surely it was risible that the android who took our heroes to Boston would have been scanned to check if he was an android? For heaven's sake everyone else is! (3) The scene on the jetty where the Korean military would take only the child, leaving behind the parents was just too contrived (to provoke the intended emotional response). It was also illogical. They would take the child because that was "uncomplicated", they said, whereas taking the parents would be "complicated"! Hang on! Why complicated? Because the parents would need jobs and a house. Righty-o - but won't the child need a house and a job when he grows up? And, erm, doesn't he sort of need a house right away? Or is the plan to stick him in a rabbit hutch? Even pure number-crunchers really ought to get it that it makes economic sense to take at least the mother - because she will look after the child. She's also best equipped to keep the kid on the straight and narrow. There are also economic complications in not taking the mother. The child would have to be placed in an orphanage or a foster family would need to be found. If the latter, wouldn't the parenting need to be subsidized? Above all, the illogic lies in the fact that the good old post-apocalyptic US is not exactly full of refugees. Virtually everyone is dead. Boston is the last fortified city. Yet how many refugees were queuing up on the jetty waiting rescue as Boston burns? Just the three of them! So where is the economic burden for South Korea in putting them on the boat! None! A powerful movie undone by errant stupidity at the death!

Sandesh and Connor - what can I say? You guys are HILARIOUS! Satire lives! Really clever wasn't it, the way that the reality stuff in the movie was filmed with a fogged lens and with dull colours whereas all the delusional stuff going on in our heroine's head was bright and vivid? Wow! That was so subtle! Of course, since the movie was about her psychological unravelling, this rendered redundant narrative and plot and drama...and well everything. That was phenomenally clever as well!

Mortal Engines is undoubtedly a flawed movie. The characters are perfunctory. The plot is predictable. The finale is Disneyesque. But, despite all of that, Mortal Engines is a compelling movie, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is visually stunning, breathtaking to look at. Secondly, its political subtext makes it interesting. The premise that it is based upon gives it a poetic tragic doom-laden quality that allows it to transcend the limitations of plot and character. Politically, this movie is not at all incoherent, as the critics would have it. The movie depicts a wasteland world, following the collapse of civilisation, in which predator cities on caterpillar tracks scour the landscape for the scarce resources to preserve their own existence and cultured way of life for their urban elites. The fact that this system of "municipal Darwinism" is unsustainable madness does not detract from the inner coherence of the premise one iota. After all, global industrial capitalism is also unsustainable madness, but here we are. The warrior cities are locked into a logic of Darwinian competition because that is the only way they can sustain themselves within the system, even though the system itself is doomed, since it produces nothing and it needs to consume everything that is left. The irony here was that the mobile warrior city of London required virtually all of its plunder from its depleted hunting grounds simply to feed its insatiable engines - movement for the sake of movement in place of capitalism's production for production's sake! Nonetheless, the plot limitations do undermine the movie at the finish. The most obvious defect in this respect was the failure of the defenders of the Shield Wall protecting the fixed settlements of the East to dispatch London into oblivion before it had the chance to power-up its doomsday weapon. The opportunity was certainly there, with the defending fleet airborne, but then inexplicably failing to take action, hovering statically above their own city. A second defect was the implausibly benign response of the defenders to London's survivors after the city was immobilised by the heroes of the piece. They had just witnessed the almost complete destruction of their own city in an unprovoked attack, after all. This attack was genocidal, and described by the city Elder as the "unleashing of hell on Earth". Yet here they were, these Easterners, offering smiles and hands of friendship to the bedraggled band of Little Englanders (the 23rd century equivalent of today's "hard Brexiters") emerging sheepishly from the wreck of Imperial London. OK, the point was to counterpose universal human values of solidarity to those of Western militarism and colonialism. But this was at the price of wild narrative idealism that just seemed foolish. Not even a judicial trial and restorative community-based justice seemed to be on the cards! Nonetheless an epic movie!