High on concept, low on thrills

Johnson Thomas

A post-apocalyptic Young Adult tale based on the award-winning 2001 novel of the same name by Philip Reeve, this Peter Jackson powered and Christian Rivers helmed exercise (in stirring up a faithful YA audience for a new franchise), falls slightly short of expectations. 

  The team behind this film is the same as the one that gave us the luminous The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogy. So, the high expectations were bound to be belied. The storyline conjures up some great futuristic battles and legends could well have been created along the way but it’s basically the visual clutter that keeps you from being totally inveigled.

The set-up is a futuristic dystopia set thousands of years after a cataclysmic event with humans trying to survive on a devastated planet. The landscape involves gigantic moving cities ruthlessly preying upon smaller traction towns. 

   It’s not an unbelievable premise given the manner in which humans are trying to self-destruct, thanks to the current scenario of conspicuous consumption, deteriorating human value systems, criminal acts based on caste, religion, gender, and hazards brought on by climate change. So when a partially-disfigured young woman named Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar) comes close to killing Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), the man responsible for the death of her mother Pandora (Caren Pistorius) – you get the drift. 

Hester manages to escape retribution aspiring aviator Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan) and later on teams up with the leader of the rebellious Anti-Traction League, Anna Fang (South Korean singer-turned-actress Jihae) and they firm up a plan to stop Thaddeus at all cost.

The film is technically proficient no doubt, but the scripting and the narration could have done with a little more fleshing-up. Too many characters and subplots in a rather short two-hour runtime don’t allow for stretchable world building. Dan Hennah’s astonishing production design makes everything real; a motorised city of London on wheels, a floating metropolis suspended above the sky with inflated gas bags, flying machines that rely on Wright Brothers’ designs but have capabilities much beyond what they ever imagined, old-city downsizing machines and devastated trenches in the surrounding land mass. And it’s all been vividly realised through cutting-edge CGI. The unintelligible editing (especially the action sequences) fails to help drum up the requisite fervour or excitement despite a stimulating Tom Holkenborg score and some invested performances. Characters like Stephen Lang’s cyborg Shrike fail to strike up the antipathy mainly because of poor development. Special effects and some of the integrated action set-pieces look impeccable but it doesn’t add enough power to the overall charm of this high concept enterprise.