BNP At NYCC 2018: ‘Mortal Engines’ Rolling Into Theaters This December

On Friday, Oct. 5, 2018, at New York Comic Con, director Peter Jackson, best known for bringing Middle Earth to life in the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films, premiered the first 25 minutes of his new post-apocalyptic fantasy film, Mortal Engines. Mortal Engines, based on the novel by Philip Reeve, takes place in a version of the future in which societies are mobile, contained in large, moving machines. The movie opens with a city scene, a kind of steampunk cityscape where old technology meets new. Suddenly, when an alarm goes off, warning of the approach of a larger roving city-machine in the distance, the smaller city transforms. Its metal gears and panels shift to create another moving machine. There’s a pursuit across uninhabited terrain, and the smaller machine is chased alongside a canyon by the larger. But, we soon discover, the larger machine is not just some anonymous predator city but rather future London; a cannibalistic society-machine that “ingests” the smaller one with a Union Jack conspicuously painted on its metal “mouth.”

Within this new version of London, young historian Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan, from Misfits) uncovers some shady happenings related to weaponry and the leader of this society, Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving). Natsworthy ends up teaming up with Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar) who is seeking vengeance and a well-known outlaw named Anna Fang (Jihae) to lead a rebellion. With its focus on the class differences and prejudices among differen…