Oops.
I saw it last night, and uh… I’m not surprised. It was bad. Like, it takes a lot to sour me on a movie that starts out with one town chasing another town across the prairie, but… Damn. The script was really bad. Some of this might reach into spoiler territory, so…
The thing I remember most vividly from the movie is a scene near the end. There’s this rather monstrous robot-zombie-hybrid thing that has been chasing our protagonists throughout the film. Then, it gets a huge humanizing moment as it dies for not murdering one of the main characters. Problem is, by this point, it had killed thousands of people and destroyed a floating city. No, I’m sorry, you do not get to humanize the genocidal murderbot.
The film clearly has a lot to say about british colonialism and cultural differences but it says it all in a stupid, heavy-handed way. Why yes, London literally eating other cities alive is an intriguing metaphor. But then you never actually do anything interesting with it beyond that?
The director has no idea how to shoot action scenes. Every fight scene is a shaky-cam mess that makes it nearly impossible to follow the action. The dogfight scenes near the end are a little better, but not much.
There’s this whole B plot that’s given a ton of airtime with the main villain’s daughter, and at the end of the movie, the payoff is… After he’s lost the battle, she disowns him. That’s it. It’s a fucking joke. She basically does nothing and the movie would have been better without the entire subplot.
In short: it’s bad. 
I saw an interview with Peter Jackson, who is a Doctor Who fan.
He said he’d like to direct an episode - marvellous!
But even better - he offered to use some ‘Mortal Engine’ city sets from his film…
The movie sounds a lot like a Doctor Who episode, albeit without the silliness and fun.
And without the Doctor, for that matter.
<sigh>
I’m a huge fan of the books and had high hopes for the film but everything I’ve seen and heard makes me believe that they sanitized the story into pointlessness. In the books Hester, despite being one of the main protagonists, is a disfigured amoral killer; that’s one of the elements that make the stories so compelling. It sounds like they made her “plucky” instead. Tom (in somewhat of a gender role reversal) is the wide-eyed Pollyanna of the pair who offers her a skewed redemption by his love. Pretty much everyone else in the story either turns out to be morally repugnant, dies horribly, or both.
Pennyroyal’s ongoing survival is a deliberate sore point; you’re pretty much supposed to hate him and the fact that he lasts as long as he does. Shrike’s humanization and the reason he reacts to the one character in the way he does is a key plot point for the whole main series and is explained in the prequels (my books say “Shrike”, BTW). And in the first book the main villain’s daughter subplot is critical to the big final battle but she doesn’t just disown her father, which suggests that once again the filmmakers altered what was a rather powerful scene because they thought it was too dark.
@Gyrate (spoilers, obv)
Hester is kinda disfigured (y’know, in the standard “we’re not willing to make our pretty actress disfigured” way), but “amoral” doesn’t really hit the mark; she’s absolutely moralized as “justified” the moment we get past “she stabbed the dude”, and she goes soft/is stuck in a fridge by injury almost as quickly.
There’s clearly a “right side” here; they’re playing up the goodness of the folks living behind the wall and the anti-tractionists hard. The anti-tractionist leader is portrayed as good much in the same way Morpheus or Trinity is in the Matrix movies - sure, she kills a lot of folks, but they all had it coming, and she’s definitely “the good guy”. If the books went for shades of grey, the movies most certainly do not; this is basically just Rebels vs. Alliance, with the twist that one of our good guys is just basically Finn from Star Wars. They even play up the “city darwinism” angle and put the city cops in stormtrooper suits to make it even more clear that one side is just basically Nazis - and that’s before they bring out the freakin’ death star - sorry, “M.E.D.U.S.A.”.
Shrike’s humanization might have been important in the novels but here it is neither important nor well-handled. It feels tacked-on, and the fact he doesn’t kill Tom because it would make her sad feels like a completely unearned psychological gut punch, attempting to redeem the inhuman murder-bot immediately after he killed hundreds if not thousands of people. Pretty much everything about Shrike just does not work in the movie, regardless of how it was in the book.
Pennyroyal isn’t even there. Valentine is maybe the one character that comes out of this looking even remotely decent; Hugo Weaving is just a damn good actor hamming it up in a fun (if poorly-written) villain role. I really can’t hate that, even if the script is just painfully bad half the time. His daugher… well, she does fucking nothing for basically the entire movie except ask piercing questions, then does nothing but disown him after the final battle. It’s a huge letdown. What happens in the books?
From memory:Valentine’s daughter Katherine takes up with the historians and learns about her father’s villainy. She sneaks up into St Paul’s where MEDUSA is being powered up and Hester is being held. Valentine tries to kill Hester but Katherine throws herself between them and he accidentally stabs her. She falls on the MEDUSA panel, hitting a lot of buttons and causing the system to overload. Tom rescues Hester in an aircraft; Valentine holds his daughter’s body as MEDUSA melts down and fries all of London. Everybody dies horribly except Hester and Tom.
HA! As if!
Man, they screwed the pooch on that one. At no point in the story is Hester held captive by Valentine. Attempts on her life are foiled by Anna Fang, who sacrifices herself in a final battle with Valentine so that Hester can use a USB stick she has which makes the Medusa self-destruct (apparently a movie-only bullshit plot contrivance). Katherine lives (as said, her full interaction with her father is to see him and disown him, then run off), and actually helps save the day. In the end, Tom (with her help) flies into the heart of London and blows up the core. Everyone except Fang and Valentine live, the Londoners are welcomed as refugees into the eastern kingdom.
Your version sounds better, but given the quality of the script, I can’t imagine it being very good either way.
Wow, BPC, that sounds terrible. And they wonder why it tanked.
By the way, in the book Anna Fang gets stabbed in the neck and killed by Valentine in an earlier scene. In subsequent books she gets made into a Stalker.As I said, everyone dies horribly.
I’m glad they made this movie, but I found the sequel books to be afterthoughts and nowhere near as good. I’m fine if this is the only one that exists and will check it out on dvd/streaming later.
Spoiler for book:
Is London pretty much destroyed? It is in the book, but sequels reveal some remnants/shell remain.
Between this and
this I feel like I dodged a bullet. It’s as if all the Sci Fi writers died of boredom and this was their farewell middle finger to the world.
I had never heard of these books until this thread for the film. My first reaction was “what a stupid idea for a story” but hey, I thought the same thing about the Twilight books and Fifty Shades of Grey and the whole fast & Furious franchise, so I was fully prepared for this to be a blockbuster success. Now I’m just kind of bemused that so many other people apparently thought the same thing I did (a rarity, to be sure).
I saw the trailer on TV and actually said out loud, “What The Fuck?”.
You can look at the “history” section here (events that took place in the prequel books.)
No thanks; don’t need to. See my previous post.
Just attempting to fight your ignorance on the worldbuilding.
Your time would be better spent fighting the stupidity in the premise.
Eh. I find the premise pretty much equally technologically and culturally plausable to just about everything in The Expanse. Tomato, tomato.
If the story had actually been the gonzo nutcase “city on city action” shit promised in the trailer for more than like… one scene, I would have totally dug it. 
Like, seriously - how fucking wrong is it that the movie starts with a monologue on “predator cities” and there’s a grand total of one scene featuring a city preying on another city?