Thread by @OSPyoutube

Okiedokes! Quick round of polling the top options I haven't already watched -R

Ooh boy! I've only heard very vague things about this movie so I'm deeply curious about what's coming -R

so humanity nuked the earth and the simplest way to survive this blasted hellscape was to… make the cities mobile and also carnivorous 🤔 -R

well, so far this movie LOOKS fabulous -R

these people should consider building cities in… mountains… and other places that are hard for huge cumbersome vehicle cities to traverse… -R

why in god's name does a city that is constantly in motion even HAVE a ceramics section of the museum -R

Oh hey it's the pretty dude from umbrella academy! wassuuup -R

wrow, is this social commentary about durn millennials being glued to their phones? -R

"Wow, this movie got you QUICK," says my brother when I respond to his question about some plot exposition with "WHO CARES" -R

I don't know who this smarmy fuckboi is but he was mean to umbrella academy boi, who I surmise is named Tom, and is thus probably Evil -R

"Be warned. Children may be TEMPORARILY separated from parents." Wuhoh, bad sign when the fictional evil carnivore cities have a comparable but more well-managed immigration system than modern america :x -R

They've introduced way too many attractive young people way too quickly and I can't tell who they are
-blond lady who I think is agent smith's daughter
-tom
-significant red scarf lady with a knife who I assume is the hero
-dude who dropped a bunch of screwdrivers

-R

also there's a dialogue trope they've done twice so far which is
"*significant metaphorical line*"
"Sorry?"
*beat, zoom*
"*repeated line… but with more significance*"

scarf lady has a pretty gnarly scar and just stabbed elrond but apparently he's fine? guess she missed all his vital organs -R

Scarf lady: elrond killed my mom *falls off cliff*
Tom: elrond she said you killed her mom
Elrond: ha that's crazy *fuckin yeets him off the same cliff*

quick villainy reveal turnaround, goddamn

this is an innovative fantastical setting with an ensemble cast of hot people so by all rights I SHOULD be having a great time but for some reason it feels like I'm still waiting for the movie to start -R

This movie, with its precocious female lead and tagalong dude fish-out-of-water, with a beautiful post-apocalyptic setting and steampunk aesthetic… feels like a high-budget, soulless live action adaption of a ghibli movie

good god it's already been half an hour

Tom: hey let's share backstories so this plot can have a modicum of character development c:
Scarf lady: fuck off
Tom: :c

Mortal Engines, more like "pretty people falling over: the movie"

oh cool and they just met the obligatory crazy old man character, this movie really just mashed up castle in the sky and princess mononoke and made it less interesting

okay I assume the A-plot is about the energy thing elrond is building, so it's weird that our two focus characters are fuckin around in the B-plot with the quirky old people and the wasteland full of fuck-all

Elrond got fully stabbed in the torso and he was walking around like it was nothing fifteen seconda later, but Scarf Lady got lightly grazed on the leg by a harpoon and she's about ready to die

okay just making sure I've got this straight
-tom and scarf lady - in the middle of nowhere, allegedly bonding and providing the character arcs for this movie
-kate and screwdriver man - very slowly doing the A-plot energy thing
-elrond - hanging out with a zombie

Oh no the creepy old people are actually evil i bet this'll really delay the A-plot

this movie appears to work by final fantasy rules - anyone clean, young and hot is a future protagonist, everyone else is evil

evil zombie robot man is pretty spooky but it does beg the question, why bother to stick a reanimated corpse in there when you can clearly just make a whole-ass robot assassin

tom and scarf lady have hung out for about ten hours, they've had three Classic Romcom Maneuvers (falling on top of each other, "oh no you're injured :(", etc) and they just had an argument about hester's zombie dad, so they're just speedrunning the whole romantic subplot right

oh I was not expecting him to have already been a zombie when he was her dad, that's pretty dope, so is his hobby of collecting fucked-up and rejected things because they remind him of himself

in three minutes, zombie dad ironically becomes the most fleshed-out and interesting character

awww he just wanted to help her and the only way he knew how to do that was making her into a rad cyborg murderbot, that's sweet in a very fucked-up way

Tom: so why didn't you want to become a soulless dessicated amnesiac zombie murderbot
Scarf lady: cuz I REALLY wanted to stab elrond and literally no other reason

they've graduated to awkward handholding, hooraaaaaaaay

new hot person spotted, future protagonist in sight

listen, this movie is paced really weirdly and the plot is incredibly confusing but the visuals are nice and every single one of these protagonists is distractingly hot so it's not all bad

the ghibli parallels never stop, the bad guys are trying to resurrect an ancient weapon that destroyed the old world, which is a very gnarly plan - wish we'd had some inkling of this before the hour and fifteen minute mark

"There are no lessons to be learned from the past. History doesn't care - it is DEAD." -elrond dishes a neato villain line that I assume is only good because it was taken from the books

on the other hand, "you're a relic from the past, a dinosaur" "then what does that make you?" "me? I'm the meteor" is HILARIOUSLY BAD

oh no, the bad guys are going to target… a city that has been mentioned once and shown onscreen never. I'm suddenly impossibly uninvested in this conflict

nooo zombie-dad don't kill the hot sky pirates they're so sexy aha~

oh boy it's my old favorite trope, "a third party informs a character that she's in love because the chemistry doesn't speak for itself"

nooooo zombie-dad, I knew your character was too compelling to last

Awwwwww his memory montage is really sweet… showing hester as a child, then the photo of himself and his kid pre-zombie, then the kid's hand… and his hand taking the kid's hand as he dies…… how dare this movie hide a brilliant ten-minute short film behind the other nonsense

oh okay so apparently the plot all along has been that someone had the bright idea of building a Big Wall the dumb predator-cities couldn't get past and the big evil london plan is to blow the wall up and reach sparkling new horizons to be a dumb predator city in

I feel like… maybe this story would have worked better as an episodic series? That format is better suited for a character-driven narrative like this is clearly trying to be, and the visual design is so good it makes me upset it's not part of a better-executed story

they're setting up for the final scary confrontation, london is powering up the fuck-you beam and everyone is JUST STANDING AROUND LOOKING PENSIVE

Wow, the fuck-you beam has a hell of a kick, but for an apocalyptic city-cracking weapon it's actually kinda… small-scale. Impressive shockwave, but it only put a hole in the wall

I'm getting some death flags off the hot lady sky-pirate, she mentioned how she's cool with dying as long as she gets an air burial and they did that thing where when she heads off on the final mission someone's like "I am concerned :c" and she's like "I'll be fine don't worry~"

I just realized I forgot kate and screwdriver guy were in this movie

only the hottest skypirate survived the attack, my theory of hot-people protagonist supremacy is really holding up

pro tip: if you're ever in a fictional story and you really wanna die, make sure you say "Hey!" and then when the character turns around, smile and say "…Take care of her." Doesn't matter who "her" is - you WILL be dead in one to three scenes.

ayyyyyyy it spells "MEDUSA" when she plugs it in, that's Cute

Weren't there two other protagonists in this movie? Wasn't it a big deal that they were investigating the shenanigans in the church? Where are they now? WHO KNOWS

oh hey found one of them, she's just standing there looking disappointed

so his rad superweapon went out like a punk and now he's just got his dudes murdering people for no reason because I guess if he can't make london a city-killing superweapon nobody else can have it

wait wait let me guess what's about to happen

So earlier they established that Elrond visited scarf lady's mother regularly, so I kind of assumed it was obvious that he was thus her dad

But I bet he's about to drop that like it's news and she's about to be very upset

ding ding ding! and even though he says she already knew, she's still freaking out about it

Okay mad props to Tom for some trick flying into the engine, I fully assumed he was gonna try and pull a heroic sacrifice and crash into it but instead he just pulled a trench run and fired a missile at it

Some of the dialogue in this movie is distractingly clunky - like character A will say something that sounds stilted and character B will respond with something Clever that wouldn't work without the setup

Like "is this what you want? You're gonna die!"
"No… I'm gonna LIVE"

tom and hester are having a great time with their own private airship, kate is leading her people into the big wall city, and everyone forgot screwdriver man was in this movie - guess he wasn't hot enough to get a character arc

Question. The predator cities are demonstrated to be incredibly inefficient, unsustainable and much less practical than just settling down in a defensible position and building a nice big wall around it. Why the FUCK did SO MANY PEOPLE BUILD PREDATOR CITIES THEN

That movie made me sad. It had a lot of things I liked (mostly pretty scenery and hot people) and one really good character arc (for a zombie robot ninja) but overall the pacing made it hard to get invested or feel the impact of the story :c

I meant Fire Emblem rules but you know what I think I'm right either way -R