Wait, what? Peter Jackson is actually making a movie of Mortal Engines, the novel about giant predatory cities roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape?
Ambitious. Let’s hope he doesn’t plan to turn the first novel into a sprawling nine-movie series with buckets of extra ideas poured in. I don’t know if he can make a lean, exciting story any more.
Yawn. I see Mad Max only bigger. Huge! Bet it’s loud.
Disney has a new full-length film out: Ferdinand. Based on the 1938 short Ferdinand the Bull (based on the story by Munro Leaf). Much easier on the psyche, although the original 7 minute version is probably enough.
I’m not interested in anything involving Peter Jackson after the hatchet job he did on LoTR.
Regarding the trailer.. it reminded me of all the swashbucklers that had a sailor say, “Ship ahoy!” only to show another ship 500 yards away.
As if that message hadn’t already arrived from the tops six hours before, when the other ship’s sails were just visible over the fucking horizon.
She looks for a disturbance and points her telescope to find it… and doesn’t even point in the right direction in the first place, when it’s the city of London, which overwhelms 80° of her un-magnified vision.
Someone at WETA: “If we can get the boss to make a series that’s nothing but model effects… We’ll live like kings!”
I rather like Peter Jackson’s Hobbit films. Given the price of cinema tickets these days I feel rather cheated if I get less than two and a half hours of film for my money. Admittedly all that nonsense with Tauriel and Kili could have been cut, but the additional Dol Guldur scenes and the White Council stuff really resonated with me.
Also, I thought this was supposed to be some sort of steampunk alternate future film? Having had the misfortune to have lived in the godforsaken bowels of London for the last two months I am finding it difficult to see what they’re supposed to have changed.
@wwheydt #2
A-freakin’-men, sister/brother. A-freakin’-men.
OP: “… can make a lean, exciting story anymore”; did he ever?
I loathe Jackson’s LotR with the heat of a thousand suns, but I actually like the Hobbit films, including the Kili/Tauriel thing. Could’ve cut a lot of the extended “action” sequences, though. Billy Connolly’s turn as Dáin II Ironfoot was priceless.
I don’t understand the hatred for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I think they’re pretty much the best films ever made. Still, each to their own I suppose.
Huh. I had not heard of Philip Reeve’s series until now. (I’m sadly out of date in SF it seems.)
My first thought when I read “giant predatory cities roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape” was, wait, is that Christopher Priest’s Inverted World where a giant city is winched along tracks through a post-apocalyptic landscape? Or, maybe James Blish’s Cities in Flight, where whole cities dome themselves and fly away from a post-apocalyptic Earth? Rogue cities on the run are a thing, I guess.
cartomancer-
I’m with you. I still watch the LOTR trilogy (director’s cut) once a year because I love how it brought the story to life. The attention to detail was amazing, and it’s one of the few movies where it nearly lived up to my internal imagination.
On the other hand, I thought they took a simple children’s story, and turned it into a bloated, pointless nightmare.
Jackson’s LotR movies were visually pleasing.
The hatred comes from the butchery of the story and characters.
I’ve never seen his Hobbit trilogy (only assorted excerpts and trailers and “making of…”), and I haven’t been too impressed. I don’t grok how a trilogy is made based on a short book, and based on what I have seen, he didn’t grok how to do it either.
OTOH, whilst there are bits of the LotR I cringe at, I do like it overall and broadly concur that it “brought [what is approximately] the story to life”.
Chigau-
How did it butcher the story and characters? I like Tom Bombadil, but he was pointless in the story and would have slowed the story way, way down. Arwen getting to do a few more things was nice- I didn’t feel like it was character assassination. I would have love to have seen the Shire battles, and showing how you can’t protect things- they will change- but the ending is already a little long.
cartomancer @8:
Too much for a short comment, but some lowlights: The horrendous miscasting of Frodo*; the brain-numbingly boring background music**; too many WTF moments to count.
To be clear – as far as I’m concerned, Jackson could have taken plenty of liberties with the plot. For example, why not include Arwen in the Company of the Ring? But too many of his specific choices were gratuitously horrible, and not even remotely necessary.
But in the end, as you say, à chacun son goût.
*Others too, but that’s the biggie.
**But the closing song “Into the West” is quite lovely.
The Tom Bombadil part of the story explained how the Hobbits got the enhanced swords which, when not wielded by a “man”, could wound / kill the witch-king. In the movie, Aragorn just mysteriously shows up with a bundle containing the magical barrow-blades; it’s all quite unexplained and is one of things I cringe at. I wouldn’t call the editing-out of Bombadil butchering the story — but inept reworking — an example of butchering the story would be when an advisor to Faramir somehow knows everything that is going on…
That said, there were some good set pieces, like Éowyn and Merry putting paid to the top Ringwraith.
Faramir’s refusal of the ring was a pretty important plot-point in the books.
Gimli was not a clown in the books.
There was one elf at Helm’s Deep, not hundreds.
How did Saruman die?
Sigh. It’s not a Peter Jackson film. It’s a Christian Rivers and Fran Walsh film.
Through just to be sure no one is behaving hypocritically: Weinstein has a executive producer credit on LoTR. Miramax funded the project for the first 3ish years of its existence.
Filmamir>>>>Faramir in that Faramir is unbelievable as in I literally don’t believe a character would behave that way.
One of the several improvements the film made on the story. Also glad the cut the false climax of the de
Filmamir>>>>Faramir in that Faramir is unbelievable as in I literally don’t believe a character would behave that way.
One of the several improvements the film made on the story. Also glad the cut the false climax of the destruction of the Shire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Engines_(film)
Now that’s my kind of unrealistic sci-fi!
@3 davidnangle
At that range a telescope is used to read the ship’s flag and name crest. In the teaser Hester(?) uses it to identify the pursuing city as London.
Ha, de gustibus and all that, because I largely loved Jackson’s LOTR film trilogy (less a couple of nerd quibbles) and indeed thought the score was damn near the best part, but I detest and abominate what he did to The Hobbit! We’ll see what comes of this one, but I’m sure the special effects will be thrilling.
Can’t believe the same guy that made LOTR made the Hobbit. Anyway, yeah there’s like 4 books in the Mortal Engines books, so expect 9 movies.
Make up your mind.
I mostly enjoyed LotR, and accepted most of the changes to the plot as being somewhat justified – merging Glorfindel into Arwen just to have a female character actually do something useful for example. Cutting Tom Bombadil I disliked but grudginly accepted, cutting the Scouring I thought wise even if I didn’t really like it – it would have seemed a huge anti-climax to many, and the movie was already very long. But the changes in that the changes to various characters were always made in the direction of making them more buffoonish, more stupid, or more greedy purely to make the central characters more do-goody by comparison.
The ents were made into morons just to give Merry and Pippin a chance to trick or goad them into action; Faramir was made less wise a judge of character to add another drama point for Frodo and Sam; Denethor was made to be a terrible leader riddled with simple greed and arrogance – as opposed to the formerly wise leader manipulated into despair by Sauron via the palantir – seemingly just to make Gandalf and Pippin’s job more difficult; Gimli was turned into comic relief because dwarves = short and fat I guess, to provide increased contrast to the hyper competent Legolas… but worst of all was Gollum replacing Sam in Frodo’s trust what the fuck. The central relationship to the entire goddamn story, thrown away just to add a bit of drama.
After that, the announcement that The Hobbit was going to be another three part epic was enough to show me it was doomed. I watched An Unexpected Journey just in case I was wrong, but I wasn’t.
Maybe this will clear it up.
I am looking forward to this one. I’ve read a lot of Reeve, including the Hungry Cities books (the first of which is Mortal Engines), and the Fever Crumb books. Not sure what the potential is for sequels on this one…I guess it depends on how much money the film makes. I remember the disastrous adaptation of The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, and how 2 planned sequels were summarily ditched. Actually, that’s a good lesson in fandom for moronic movie producers; if you mangle a story so much that it barely resembles the source material, you’d better hope that you have written a good enough script and employed a talented enough director such that the movie can create a new and mostly distinct fanbase. If you want to capitalize on an existing fanbase, minor adjustments can usually be made (see the Harry Potter books/movies), but The Golden Compass movie made changes so significant that most fans of the book hated the movie, and the new story was not good enough to lure in people who hadn’t read or liked the book.
So who knows how much Mortal Engines will resemble the book; the world-building in the books is tremendous, and I love the concept of Municipal Darwinism. But this is Peter Jackson we’re talking about (even if he’s only an EP); we’ll see how well it turns out.
Mike Smith@19,
Are you going to work this stupid, dishonest crappily constructed strawman into every thread you possibly can?
Why does this remind me of the Crimson Permanent Assurance?