#i get that it's apocalyptic so it's gonna be a reduced population and everytjing packed into as small a space as possible

[dont-offend-the-bees]

The Mortal Engines movie is on TV rn and quite apart from all the other adaptational mistakes they made, I can't help but think on a very fundamental level they failed at the sense of scale that makes this concept fucking sick. Like I just think it was a mistake doing all these clear sky, broad daylight wide shots that show the entire moving city in the frame. A wide shot or two might have been fine, you often get that kind of thing as an establishing shot when you're showing people what city a movie's set in, but IRL when was the last time you stood somewhere and could see an entire city, end to end? Only when you're far enough away that it looks tiny, right?

I think they probably just wanted to show off their CGI/designs with the well-lit wides, but what if more of this had been shot from low angles, closer up? What if there was more fog, or just more shots constructed as if seen through the limitations of human eyes rather than telescopic camera lenses? What if we had all sat in the cinema wondering if we were here to watch the latest YA fantasy or a fucking horror movie when we were pinned to our seats feeling like prey animals as impossibly vast, impossibly loud, impossibly hungry machines too massive to comprehend tore across the broken world like mechanical land leviathans, barely visible as more than horrifying looming shapes in the dust and smoke?