Rainworld fans have a love hate relationship with the game.

I am Rainworld fans.

On the world of Mortal Engines, class, and the metaphors of consumption

This is less an essay and more a collection of thoughts. Basically I just saw a video on the Mortal Engines film and its being a civilisation too stupid to exist. I got fed up, mainly because so many of the criticisms amounted to ‘the book did it better’ with little elaboration but also the arrogantly grating voice of the presenter got on my nerves, but I cannot deny the points made and in fact wanted to elaborate further on the worldbuilding of this series and, while unrealistic, look at why the books were so engaging.

Some background to start off - Mortal Engines is a four-book series (and three-book prequel sub-series) written by English author Phillip Reeve, and depicts a bleak post-apocalyptic world. North America is uninhabitable and lost to the sands of time, irradiated, poisoned, and flattened by war. Eurasia is mostly barren plains. And, of course, the central premise - towns and cities have raised themselves onto mobile platforms and trundle about. Well, mostly. A major antagonist to this system is the Anti-Traction League, a collective of nations hiding out in old east China, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia and some of Africa. They are seen as barbarians and heathens by much of the world for refusing to mobilise, instead hiding in stationary citadels behind their mountains. The Traction Cities near-universally engage in a philosophy of Municipal Darwinism, a savage system of bastardised pseudo-biology where cities literally predate each other and ‘consume’ each other for resources. Cities eat towns, towns eat smaller towns. Some towns and cities deliberately adapt to cheat the system and make themselves a less appetising target, or for that matter a more aggressive and efficient hunter.

THE TRACTION CITIES

The first three books tend to focus their action on one or two cities, whereas the last is a bit more of a road trip. The other consistent thread is multiple characters’ stories running concurrently, usually reconnecting near the end. This allows the books maintain an open, almost global scale - you’ll nearly never not be moving, even sitting still on a city, which reinforces the theme of unnatural life. The first book focuses on London, which has been sulking in what was once Britain (by sheer happenstance on their part and pure irony on ours), and is suddenly running at full pelt back into Europe and eastward as fast as her engines can carry her. Why? London’s not the biggest city around, and the vast expanse of Eurasia is now the Great Hunting Ground - it’s where the big boys play, and by play I mean ‘savagely predate each other’. It’s dangerous territory for a little city. But over the first book, it becomes increasingly apparent that Traction Cities are increasingly non-viable option for existence. Fuel is scarce, prey moreso, and what morsels London can confidently snap up will not sustain it for long. There is an ecosystem at play here - static settlements can farm resources, but are universally seen as food, either by small bandit settlements to raid for supplies or for larger towns to just straight-up eat. Small towns too small to hunt tend to be miners or gatherers, either mining minerals to use or trade, or gathering resources like wood from natural deposits or sifting through the waste heaps left by bigger cities. Most cities bigger than that are ‘urbivores’, or hunter towns, that hunt and eat smaller prey or opportunistically scavenge the ‘carcasses’ of dead cities. I mentioned specialisation earlier, and like in nature, species and cities can occupy a niche that gives them an advantage and thus increased chance at survival. Airhaven, for example, is a politically-neutral city in the air that floats around Eurasia seasonally and serves as a rest stop, fuelling station and trading exchange for airship pilots the world over, Tractionist or no. Tunbridge Wheels is a pirate-run town that has a lightweight wooden chassis and flotation devices to hunt amphibiously in a world where many small towns escape threat by setting up on islands.  Panzerstadt-Bayreuth is a conurbation of four massive cities, too big to survive long without prey, they banded together to take down the biggest of prey (it’s unclear whether they achieve this through sheer size or whether they decouple and become a pack hunter). Anchorage, the last American city, neutered its own jaws to increase mobility, skating around the frozen north too fast for threats to catch up with, and survives on trade. Brighton is a pleasure city that paddles around the warm Mediterranean, technically still a predator but with no real agenda and about the only city left that can be called a tourist city (it’s run on the back of brutal slave labour). And these are just the major ones. Throughout the books, cities are treated like living things ... like mortal engines.

And like living things, they need resources to survive.

A DYING WAY OF LIFE

The books are inconsistent on the origins of Traction Cities, as it turns out deliberately - history is written by the winners, after all. But it’s all closely tied to the ‘apocalypse’ part of the post-apocalytic I mentioned earlier. Long ago in-universe, long into our future, was a terrible event known as the Sixty Minute War. This war tore the world asunder with nuclear and quantum energy weaponry. America, the epicentre, is simply no more (it turns out there are some fertile areas in Nova Scotia, but for the most part America is dead). Entire new mountain ranges were born, notably the Tannhäusers in East Asia that shield the heartland of the Anti-Traction League. There was a long period of geological and tectonic instability. According to legend, Traction Cities arose to escape these instabilities. In other words, like animals will flee a volcanic eruption, cities first became mobile to escape and survive. Trade was likely facilitated by towns literally being able to park next to each other. Ironically, London was also where everything changed. After Nikola Quercus conquered (static) London with his mobile fortresses, he decided to upgrade and raise London onto wheels to become the first fully-mobile city. And he did it for war. After all, there’s no better comeback to ‘you and what army’ then literally rolling up with your entire city. By the series present, the idea had caught on and grown into the ideology described above. But herein lies the problem. Early Traction London was a tiny little thing. Now it’s not even the biggest fish in the pond, but it’s still HUGE. And, as we all know, big things need lots of energy to go. London is described as having a top speed of about sixty miles per hour at the height of a hunt. So, you need fuel. There is still oil in this world, mainly because they now have no qualms about mining Antarctica, but if you think there’s nearly enough crude oil to run a world full of cities like London you are sorely mistaken. Wood’s not much better off. And, of course, Traction Cities tend to run on some form of internal combustion engine - it’s only at the very end of the traction era that science has advanced enough for a town to experiment with magnetic levitation. So what do they burn? Well, bits of other prey towns. Do you see the problem? Use fuel to hunt towns, burn those towns for fuel. What next? And it’s not just fuel. London captures a little salt-mining town called Salthook at the beginning of the first book to introduce us to the concepts at play, and we see what goes on in the Dismantling Yards - part of a system literally called the Gut, in case the metaphor wasn’t clear yet. Everything is recycled. Bricks, mortar, steel, wood, everything. Because the state of technology is so weird in this world, Old-Tech (technology from before the SMW) can be incredibly valuable to history and/or science, and London is keen to snaffle that up too. The people are interred into refugee camps, though if you know anything about how real-life Britain treats refugees you can probably see where that is going. And it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Food is an even more pressing concern. Unless you’re very rich (more on that in a mo), food is mostly algae-based, then hardy vegetables that grow quickly like cabbage. And it’s running out fast. And London’s a big city with a lot of resources at its disposal. Most cities don’t even have that. A lot of cities are starving on the wheels, city and populace alike. A lot of cities run on slave labour, and feed those slaves as little as they can get away with. Shan Guo, home of the Anti-Traction League, is a green and vibrant land only because it doesn’t have cities running over or eating its farmlands every other day (and, again, city folk generally don’t know this - they’re given endless propaganda that Anti-Tractionists are barbarian warbands a la Mad Max). A lot of the A story is told from the point of view of Tom Natsworthy, who until the events of the book had never left London. He’s never seen bare earth or walked on mud before. He’s never seen a horse. The idea that you can survive, much less thrive, outside of a Traction City is alien to him. But on the city he came from, everything is rapidly running out, and some cities are turning to desperate measures to survive, including Arkangel openly bribing pilots to sell out the locations and courses of nearby cities. A chilling scene in the first book even has Tom see, from the safety of the air, the corpse of Motoropolis, a city not unlike London that literally just starved to death, running out of fuel and helpless as the scavengers closed in. It’s been weeks since the city stopped, and the narrative description evokes the grotesqueness and sadness of a whale carcass. Sheer Jingoism is about the only thing keeping Municipal Darwinism alive - Traction good, stationary bad.

CLASS, CLASSISM, AND OTHER SOCIAL OPPRESSIONS

In a world so starved as this, compassion is hard to come by. Cities still exist mainly by virtue of rigid social stratification, and often that stratification is literal - most medium-to-large cities have tiers, and will generally arrange those tiers based on social class. London, for example, has seven tiers. The bottom two tiers are dominated by the Gut, the engines, and homes and communities of the workers who keep them running. Tiers 4 and 3 are miscellaneous proles of increasing social standing. Tier 2 is mostly what I’d call ‘tourist London’ - lots of the nice bits and the establishments that London likes to be proud of. Because of his work at the London Museum, this is the quality of life Tom Natsworthy was most used to. Tier 1 is High London, where all the rich live and have their amenities and nice parks (and even that doesn’t last - London’s food shortage means even the High London parks are eventually, begrudgingly, turned over for food production). Katherine Valentine, the hero of the first book’s B plot, lives here. Finally there’s Top Tier, which is purely administrative. The only buildings are the Guildhall (the seat of government), St Paul’s Cathedral (which the Engineers’ Guild have secretly been installing a deadly superweapon in under the guise of ‘restoration’ work) and the headquarters of the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of London’s Guilds. Social stratification is nearly non-existant, and people are shown to get very uncomfortable when out of ‘their space’. Tom is sent to work in the Gut during the capture of Salthook as a punishment before the plot ejects him from London, and he notes being actively intimidated by the claustrophobia, the dirt, the rough and burly labourers, and the noise. But despite Tom’s relatively privileged life - he lives near High London, above the heat and noise and smoke of the engines, in the care of one of the top four Guilds of London - he is of very low social status. Tom Natsworthy is an orphan; his parents were Historians, but were killed when an accident occurred and part of Tier 3 collapsed, crushing anything on Tier 4 beneath. Even before that, the Natsworthys were middle class at best, but being orphaned meant being left to the care of an orphanage run by the Guild of his parents, the Historians. The Historians were Tom’s only source of education, and eventually they would employ him, but with no parents or money, Tom can only afford a Third-Class apprenticeship. He has no upwards mobility within the Guild, and with no money he can’t leave and train with another. His dream of being a pilot trader, or better yet adventurer, will never come true under normal circumstances. The rich live in a completely different world yet. Katherine Valentine, daughter of the Head Historian and the Lord Mayor’s ‘right-hand man’ Thaddeus Valentine, has a positively bougie lifestyle with not a care in the world. Ironically, though, it is through Katherine’s eyes that the horrors of London’s class system are revealed. Trying to find information about her father’s would-be killer, Katherine finds herself regularly travelling to the Gut, eventually befriending an apprentice Engineer who witnessed the attack. But in the Gut, life is very different. It’s not just a life of hard labour and smoke - petty criminals and the aforementioned ‘refugees’ are tasked with working dangerous and sickening jobs like managing the city’s sewage. And by that, I mean ‘harvesting literal faeces to be converted into food and fuel’. The foreman overseeing their work admits they feed such criminals nothing else. And he has the gall to be annoyed that they keep dying of diseases like cholera and typhoid! These people are denied medical care, denied treatment, denied even basic food other than being told to literally eat sh*t. And when they inevitably die? They get sent to the Engineerium to be turned into robotic zombies that can never get sick, tired or unhappy. And, eventually, they’ll be put right back to work. The crimes these criminals did to deserve this, remember, include petty theft, criticising the Lord Mayor, and living aboard a town that got eaten. The foreman literally cannot fathom why Katherine would care about these people’s wellbeing - after all, they’re just criminals. The Engineerium’s end goal in all this is, again, to staff the entire lower tiers with robot zombie workers who will never grow tired, get sick, complain or protest their lot in life, and will never disobey orders, and just enough human overseers to keep things running smoothly ... because that’s what these people are worth to London, cheap, unending labour. Katherine can’t even bring herself to tell her high-class peers about what she learned down there, because it’s such a different world that they would never empathise, much less care. Again, slave labour is common in this world, especially child slavery - Brighton runs on it to maintain its image as a floating Caligula’s Palace, and in Arkangel slavery is so normal that we watch a rich man beat a slave nearly to death for the crime of bumping into him. In the second book, we see the logical end-point of this. Anchorage’s social structure has completely fallen apart due to a plague in recent years that turned to once-proud ice city into a ghost town manned only by a skeleton crew. The margravine, Freya, is only 14, but with her parents dead, she finds herself in charge of the whole city. She has no household staff, apart from Smew, who finds himself constantly juggling outfits to adopts the roles of steward, chamberlain and so on. His official role before the plague was ... erm ... the Dwarf. He was there in a manner similar to a court jester, for the amusement of the margrave due to being a little person. But the head navigator is just ... the woman who kept the maps. The head engineer is going half-mad, seeing his dead son staring at him from the shadows, and the only reason the town’s still going is because his systems are the best on the ice and can mostly run on automatic. They have no doctor. The only other people of consequence in Anchorage are the Aakiuqs, the Inuit couple who run the air-harbour. The common workers of Anchorage number in the mere dozens. And yet, because they’re so fixated on their traditions, nobody will drop the formalities and just admits that they’re trying to uphold a class system that doesn’t work anymore. No, that’s not quite right - everybody realises it’s pointless to maintain the artifice of Anchorage’s social heirarchy, but nobody wants to be the first one to say it out loud. Much like Municipal Darwinism, nobody want to address the elephant in the room, that the system is broken and that people hold onto it because it’s comfortable in the face of uncertainty. Only in Anchorage’s darkest hour, when everything has been turned upside down and the conquerors are on their doorsteps, do the agree to drop the formalities, drop the artifice of class, and address each other as people, say what they think, and work to save what they have left. And of course, there’s the racism in the world. Life on mobile cities has made cultures smaller and more insular, considering we mainly see this series from the point of view of culturally-English towns. Throughout the first book there is a clear west vs east divide - the Traction Cities are generally English-speaking or multicultural enough that English will get you by. The Anti-Tractionist League, meanwhile, are south or east Asian, or else African, and are commonly understood to be ‘those brown people’. The only ethnically white Anti-Tractionists are from ‘Spitzbergen’ (likely Scandinavia/Finland and northwest Russia) and Hester Shaw’s family, and the latter lived on a town that floated out to an island and gave up running from predators forever. The way Tom reacts to this attitude calls to mind the way racists might refer to ‘race traitors’. There’s even an in-universe slur for people who live in static settlements; ‘Mossies’, because ‘a rolling town gathers no moss’. However, when Tom is taken to Shan Guo itself, he realises that all the propaganda he’d been fed his whole like is exactly that - propaganda. Shan Guo is described as beautiful - an endless patchwork of rolling fields and farms, colourful, bright, vibrant, heaving with life and energy. The Anti-Tractionists aren’t vicious savages, they’re just ... people. Tom can’t understand it at first. He wonders how people can live without the hum of engines or the vibrations of deckplates - he subconsciously equates city life with, well, life, and the absence of that makes him uneasy. But he can also see this culture before him, thousands of years old, outlasting even the end of the world, and he realises there is another way. The next time he sees London, he sees it from outside, from the side of the hunted, and he realises it’s not beautiful or efficient, just dirty, and huge, wrapped in its own waste smoke and driven only by destruction. For the rest of the series, even with the rise of the radicalised Green Storm (Anti-Tractionists Lv2), large Traction Cities are consistently the enemy. Tractionism as a culture is understood to only represent imperialism, destruction, and consumption, literally and figuratively.

SCIENCES SANS FRONTIERES

It should be noted that science and technology are not universally reviled by the series. As a dieselpunk series, a certain degree of technology is fundamental to the series existence. But this is a very different world than the one we know. On the one hand, engines exist that can drive entire cities. On the other, computers basically do not exist. The rare few that still exist are not in working condition, and nobody knows how to restore them. Heavier-than-aircraft don’t really exist - the third book introduces some, but they’re small, experimental ... barely more than short-range toys designed for flashy air shows but not real travel. The main form of personal locomotion in this world is by airship, and this world’s airships are far beyond anything we’ve made in our time. But lost technologies are heavily associated with the hubris and destructiveness of the Ancients. Until now. Like I said, the most powerful Guild in London is the Engineers’ Guild. And they got that way under the leadership of now-Lord Mayor Magnus Crome. It should be noted that Crome genuinely loves his city and wants it to survive no matter the cost. But under Crome, the Engineers began to dabble in sciences considered unethical to downright taboo. Most notable is the MEDUSA Project. Through Thaddeus Valentine, London came into possession of an energy weapon from the SMW ... and, more importantly, the working computer that runs the thing. In terms of Darwinist Evolution, this is like giving a monkey a gun and teaching it how to use it. MEDUSA exhibits a level of power no other force on Earth can match, and London is forced to deploy it early in a crisis. Originally, the plan was to march up to Batmunkh Gompa, the Shield-Wall that represents the only break in the mountains around Shan Guo big enough to permit a city, and blast it to cinders. Unfortunately, London attracts the attention of a bigger, hungrier city about halfway there, and is forced to fire MEDUSA at it to save its own skin. The sheer terror of what that weapon represents is revealed then. Panzerstadt-Bayreuth was the fusion of four massive cities, each one bigger and more powerful than London. MEDUSA killed it dead in one stroke - the energy beam set the entire city ablaze and ignited its fuel stores. Her engines nearly immediately exploded. When the fires go down enough for an Engineer scout ship to investigate, the people had been almost flashed into glass. The flash of light from the attack is so bright that, hundreds of miles to the south, Tom and Hester see the sky light up like a new dawn. The people of London are relieved, of course, that they didn’t all die that night, but more than that the entire city become suffused with the excitement of just how easy it would be to kill ... well, anyone they like, really. London doesn’t even stop to devour Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, as the Engineers can’t afford for the Shield-Wall to prepare for their arrival. Appropriately, and karmically, the finale has an accident lock down the computer lock down, with MEDUSA unable to fire but unable to stop gathering energy, and London melts under the heat of MEDUSA’s glare. But that wasn’t the only scientific sin committed by London’s engineers. I’ve already mentioned London trying to repurpose faeces as food, but we need to talk more about the Stalkers. Stalkers are kinda like discount Cybermen from Doctor Who - dead bodies, threaded with weird old machines and coated in armour, their brains hooked up to simple computers. Originally conceived as soldiers, they were believed long dead. However, one survived to the modern by sheer survivor instinct - Shrike. Through negotiations that are not the purview of this essay, he allowed the Engineers of London to take him apart and figure out how he worked, and hoo boy they did. The Engineers figured out how to manufacture their own Stalkers. The first batch are used as law enforcement like the Worst Robocops, but, again, the plan was to have Stalker workers all over Low London. Katherine, learning this, likens it to London ‘being a city of the dead’ (Apprentice Engineer Pod, to whom she is talking, grimly notes that the Deep Gut Prison is so awful, so callous with human life, that it already feels like that). Logically, the end-point of this idea is to have all workers in London be the resurrected dead, with just enough living to keep things in order ... oh, and they’d all be loyal to the Engineers, because remember, no Freedom of Speech here, and you can be sent to do the worst form of prison labour for dissenting against the Lord Mayor. With Crome being both Lord Mayor and Head Engineer at once, the Engineers’ creed is as good as law - traditionally, London Lord Mayors forsook their former Guild allegiances to show their representation of all of London, and Crome’s refusal to do that caused a bit of a stir. The Engineers are also keen to arm their security teams with some form of energy pistols, despite guns being outlawed in London and the police are only allowed crossbows. Crome’s rationale is the same as every two-bit mad scientist villain, of course - that science should not be held back by moral restrictions, and that progress for progress’ sake is essential for London’s survival. Really, it’s the Engineer’s survival, as they’re rather loathe to share these advancements except to exert power on those around. London isn’t the only example of technology being used to leverage control and benefit the ruling classes. Grimsby is a sunken wreck of a city somewhere in the north Atlantic, yet due to a complex series of airlocks the interior of the city is a secret hideaway of the Lost Boys, a society of children stolen from aquatic towns and trained to be thieves under the watchful eye of the mysterious Uncle. They will then take submarine walkers, attach to passing towns, steal whatever tools, fuel, food and riches they can carry, and vanish back into the depths. Uncle, naturally, takes the lion’s share of the haul. But Uncle maintains his power by careful access to technology, only letting the Boys have what they need and juggling the power structure by choosing team leaders, and punishing insubordination harshly and publicly. Uncle sees and hears everything in Grimsby with his surveillance network, and can address any give Boy in a heartbeat, training the Boys to never expect privacy from him, so that when he demands a progress update from a mission, they never question him. He rewards Boys who do well on burglaries, but more importantly than that, he chooses team leaders according to apparently inscrutable whims. The Boys believe it’s a mark of favour from Uncle, and thus social status, to be trusted with the limpet command and all the tech that comes with. Really, Uncle carefully give command to people he can trust to remain loyal to him, even if that means passing over a more talented Boy who might get a bit uppity. Even in a more mundane way, higher status in the Lost Boys means you can move closer to the heart of Grimsby, where you’re less likely to wake up and find your bedroom wasn’t as watertight as you thought and flooded in the night. Uncle, naturally, doesn’t care if a few Boys drown, so long as he doesn’t lose anything useful. Technology, and in particular access to unusual technology, is the dimension on which power is really decided.

THE END OF AN ERA

We’ve already established that this world is not a sustainable one. There are only so many cities. The inherent entropy of Municipal Darwinism is really showing. Once upon a time, big cities could ‘reproduce’, creating little satellite towns that could grow and become independent - even London had some - but those are no more. In a greedy desperation to keep moving, the predators are not reproducing, and static settlements can’t spread and grow fast enough to count there. The attack of London, and MEDUSA, turned staunch opposition into outright war, with the Green Storm being willing to doublethink their way into using the weapons of the Traction Cities in their fight to stop the Traction Cities, even recruiting ex-London Engineers to make weapons and stalkers for them, and eventually even seeking out another ancient superweapon - an orbital laser called ODIN - without a hint of irony. The Green Storm eventually face internal resistance, from Anti-Tractionists who disagree with the outright terrorism angle, and eventually crumbles. The last great Traction Cities stop. The last mobile city is New London, no longer a hunter but a trade platform, and even that probably stopped hovering about at some point. The ending is told by the great survivor, Shrike, who has cheated Death again and again, who outlived Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, Valentine, Magnus Crome, and a thousand other heroes and villains. When he awakes, long in the future, Traction Cities are not even ancient history. They’re a dream, a fantasy, too incredible to be true. But Shrike remembers, and he teaches people the story of London and Anchorage, Arkangel and Airhaven, Brighton and Harrowbarrow. Did they learn the right message from Shrike’s story? Did they learn that ruthless imperialism is like hunting faster than the food can come back, and that you will starve before you have everything you ever wanted? Did they learn that hoarding resources, gatekeeping knowledge, will lead to ruin? Did they learn, or will the repeat the same mistakes of the greed and gluttony of the Traction Era? Well, who knows.

I wish you would write a fic where the crew (the l00) lives in a disease-ridden post apocalyptic society. ( I know fics can get long, so maybe headcannons/ideas?)

Okay, but like this is what they probably would have faced?! Like everyone on the ark when they hit Earth should have been highly susceptible to any bacteria and virus that causes illness. Those buggers adapt rather rapidly and in even 100 years, no one on the ark would have had the antibodies needed to fight infection easily, so like, the common cold would knock them on their asses. Let’s not even get started that the 100 years timeline really doesn’t make sense for the grounder storyline (with the religion around the chip and whatnot) like, minimum that probably would have taken another couple of generations to be that forgotten. Give it 150 years min, but like, really, 300 years and it’d have been more believable.

I digress. I have a lot of opinions about how there was so much wasted potential, and so many things that don’t actually work OR were not given a viable explanation to explain the rules of this alt-verse, especially given that this is supposed to be our future.

Clarke, Jasper, Octavia, Monty, Finn, would have left the camp on day one in fine health, but probably by the time they’re trying to get O back with her radioactive lamprey bite, in addition to what probably would have been a massive infection for O, complete with fever and the like, the others would start to feel sick. (heightened stress, exertion, GRAVITY, etc. would all be fucking with them and making their immune systems weaker). And they’d come back to a camp full of sick people.

Being used to radiation doesn’t mean that they’d be immune to any of the  bacteria and viruses on Earth. Like, it wouldn’t even take a particularly disease-ridden alt. post-apocalyptic version of the world they were plopped into in order to kill them off. So I know you kinda meant like alt-verse from what they had, but really... this is what it should have been.

The hundred, within a few days would start getting sick, some would survive, others would die, but everyone would end up sick more than likely. The ones that survived would start to build up antibodies and would adapt to living on the ground. They would likely though, quite possibly be susceptible to illness at a much higher rate than the grounders for the rest of their lives (not 100% sure about this... but from what I understand some immunity is genetic in some ways. Especially if there was an immunodeficiency that prevailed on the ark but went unchecked/unnoticed because of a lack of bacteria that attacked that weakness.

So the remaining arkers, may not have decided to come down, realizing how many kids were dying (unlike the sudden offline with little to no spiking that happened with taking off the bracelets, this would have been prolonged and clear that the kids were falling ill). Then again, they were running out of air, so it would be certain death vs. most likely death. Moreso than it had been.

I still don’t think this is going where you asked... but I’m kinda enjoying this.

I don’t think there would have been as much a problem with the grounders - yes to an extent. Jasper would have died right off the bat (don’t even get me started on how he should have been dead anyway). And I don’t think they would have been hunted as much. They would have gotten back to camp and everyone would be too busy trying to scavenge food nearby and care for each other to make much of a fuss about anything, or to fight back when the grounders did attack.

All the grounders would have found is a bunch of sick kids and they probably would have left them to die.

When they didn’t, there might be some kind of skirmish... we’re probably down to less than 50 of the original 100. 

The first bit would have been a lot more somber affair.

Clarke would be trying to hold it together, imagine them meeting with Anya, trying to negotiate for safety and help and running up against cultural differences and values. Because technically the 100 are still invaders. Doesn’t matter that they’re sick. But Lexa gets word of things, and she’s more sympathetic, has been looking for ways that the world doesn’t have to be so harsh, jus nou drein jus daun. you know. That was something she had wanted before Clarke. So the spark of that existed from the beginning of their encounters. That she treaties with them at all is something.

Notice how this nicely allows us to skirt around killing Anya because they’re already in negotiations with the grounders before the mountain men step in.

I think the remaining hundred would have been a lot closer and care about each other a lot more openly. They would have had to rely on each other at their most vulnerable and survived only because of each other. Also, when taken by the mountain men not trusted them as much. and they would have faced a second round of illnesses within mount weather - that place is hermetically sealed! there would be a whole nother colony of bacteria and viruses in there that didn’t exist outside because they are two completely separate ecosystems.

Honestly I could keep going... because there were a lot of things like this not accounted for. I’m going to be playing though with the idea of susceptibility to disease and weather in from ruins flowers bloom  winter is coming, and the skaikru have never head to deal with changing temperatures. It won’t push it as far as I’ve outlined above. I’ll give some scifi magic reason why they’ve been mostly healthy except that one illness that the grounders infected them with. So we’ll get to see a little bit of this, looking at how do they survive when their bodies were never conditioned to survive on Earth.

It Comes at Night (17, C?)

It makes sense, I suppose, that an object as paranoid and claustrophobic as It Comes At Night feels longer than its 91 minute runtime. Then again, did anyone else feel they’d spent a full two hours watching it? It’s an exhausting endeavor, as horrifically inevitable in its finale as any tragedy, perhaps going farther in some instances than expected yet ending pretty abruptly at a moment of crisis for the few survivors. I admire how the film immediately throws you into the post-apocalyptic setting and worldview of it characters, setting it up quickly through filmmaking technique and the lived-in terror of central family Paul, Sarah, and their son Travis. Opening with the killing and cremation of Sarah’s infected father, the sheer efficiency of their removal of this dying man suggests plenty of questions on how they’ve gotten this routine so down pat - is it practice or other real world experiences? - and introduces us perfectly to these characters. Paul and Sarah are harder and less trusting of the world than their son, though they’re still a kind of loving nuclear family unit. Paul’s word is still final, though depending on the graveness of the situation he’s happy to hear contributions from the family. Travis is more visibly bothered by the ruthlessness his parents have taken up, though this is mainly manifest in increasingly surreal nightmares. These, thankfully, are the films only real forays into jump scares, and as effective as they are they ultimately feel cheap and somewhat atonal next to the slow burn psychological study on paranoia that Trey Edward Shults had been making so successfully in so many other moments. All the scenes of the primary family interacting with the outsiders is uncomfortably tense and well crafted, either escalating a situation, acting as a release valve, muddying a previous narrative, trying to keep a lid on something everyone knows is going to boil over.

The actors fill it out fine, etching out their roles memorably, though perhaps too much of the film is privileged to relative newcomer Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Travis, especially since you can feel how limited all the roles outside of the son and his domineering, paranoid father are. Carmen Ejogo feels palpably limited as Sarah compared to the rest of the cast, especially since she has almost nothing to do once second couple Will and Kim are introduced except confer with her husband and stare askance at the rest of the cast. It’s genuinely unclear between this and Alien: Covenant - at least giving her more to do in her scenes and has a better reason to sideline her narrative so earIy -  which film gives her less to do this summer. I admired the sincerity that Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough use to portray new couple Will and Kate, removing them as objects of outright distrust through a kind of decency sorely absent from Travis’ life. This ultimately makes the moments where they do have to fight for their lives sadder and seemingly more upsetting than the ones where Paul and Sarah do, the difference between cornered animals and pragmatic survivalists. Even their son has a few lines, a few close-ups, a little narrative import. 

That said, attempting to write about the film has reminded me more of what the film doesn’t offer than what it does. As impressively claustrophobic as the whole thing felt, Shults crafts a lot of different tensions without making them cohere in any interesting way. Even the lack of coherence is less interesting than it might be, but instead the different ways the film makes us anxious grate against each other without assisting the overall picture. It’s not that any one scare isn’t affecting, but it’s hard to find the unifying umbrella to put the jump scares, the hallucinogenic dream sequences, the faux-casual anxiety, the genuinely casual anxiety, fear of the unknown, and outright horror elements underneath. The variety is admirable, but it’s hard to reckon with the film’s tonal shifting once everything starts feeling like vignettes on the same kind of scenario. It Comes at Night lacks the kind of singular, rigid, claustrophobic tone that made horror films like It Follows or even chamber dramas like Cries and Whispers such terrifying yet gripping sits, ultimately worth their payoffs as we spent comparable amounts of time in front of them. It also helps that both films have stronger presentations of its characters, not exactly acting showcases or character studies but certainly give the space for great acting to arise out of their ecosystems, letting characters breathe as long as they were alive and let their personalities shine through thorny interactions and uncomfortable decision-making.

Granted, the survivors of this film’s post-apocalyptic scenario already come with plenty of steel in their spines, and the crux of the piece is as much about character relationships more than the characters, but the actors are hemmed in by how easy the trajectory of the film is to chart out. As soon as the new couple arrive all we can do is wait to see what they do wrong that blows it all to hell, not just because we know what kind of film we’re watching but because we never for a second consider that Paul, Sarah, or Travis will be the catalysts for any fuckery. The way the group-splitting decision occurs leaves no questions of loyalty or blame, dividing the expecting parties up perfectly without leaving any questions to how this miniature turf war will ultimately be settled. Everything feels like it matters, but once the film finished I was hard pressed to think of what I got out of it. The setting is fairly specific, and I didn’t mind the way that whatever infection these characters were so afraid of was mostly referred to like a Voldemort-ish unspoken evil. But at certain moments, when the film suggests something else these characters are on guard for, it trips itself up, suggesting an actual creature that Travis draws, or in the return of one character with a terrible gash in their belly. Is this an airborne virus? Some horrific nocturnal demons? The titular “It” points to the virus, a home invader, and a dog, all plausibly so, but the lack of definition around what “it” is might be a benefit if the film wasn’t gesturing towards a living, breathing thing fulfilling the role of “it” that would attack the central families.

The characters, too, are barely even defined enough beyond Paul to be considered types, and the abruptness of the last minute suggests an even more torturous but far more fascinating five minutes, or even a better 90 minute feature, as the two doomed survivors sit frozen at the kitchen table, not just reckoning with the recent past but their bleak futures. Everyone in the house that morning had died at their hands, and all that is left to determine is how they will take care of each other, in every sense of the phrase. The individual contributions of the actors, good as they are, frankly make you wish they had more to do than what they’re given. I talked earlier about how sidelined Ejogo is, but it’s not as though Keough, Abbott, or their kid are given radically more material than she does, their moments just come later in the script. The whole cast seems ready for richer characters to take, and it would’ve served everyone better to give some of the perspective that Travis got to the other, non-Paul characters. Harrison and Edgerton do fine work, but I can’t find much to really say about them. Whatever the actors add to their performances, they don’t have the space to deepen them in any surprising way.

Ultimately, I’m not quite sure what to take away from It Comes at Night. The picture would’ve benefitted tremendously from a more cohered range of tones, more room for its characters to breathe, perhaps for the audience to breathe too, and an ending that allowed the survivors room to explore the ramifications of their actions in their final moments. I enjoyed the film plenty while I was sitting in front of it, but for the life of me I’m not sure what ideas I’m supposed to take away from this. The inherent insustainability of human bonds in life-or-death scenarios? It surely can’t be about the consequences of distrust and paranoia, since Paul and Sarah are pretty much right all the time. It can’t be a study on the horrific lengths one goes to to survive since. Well. Anyways. I’d say the idea here seems muddy but I’m not quite sure what it is, to be quite honest. When the film ended, most of our theater let pretty quickly. Ahead of me and Jack was a pair of women, one of whom turned to the rest of theater asking “That was it?” and I agreed with her 100%. I also agreed with Jack about enjoying the oppressiveness of the film’s style, but we spent about equal time discussing the trailer for the Murder on the Orient Express remake, and Kenneth Branagh’s awful mustache. Is it hard to get to the center of It Come at Night because the center is more elusive than I’m giving it credit for, or because it’s as insubstantial as I think it is? I don’t plan on rewatching it to find out, and this has for sure made the idea of seeing Shults’ first feature Krisha a much more dubious prospect. I’m excited by the idea of a good film by somehow who seems so interested working with claustrophobia and tonally oppressive projects, and if this feature is the proper stepping stone for him to make that film, I’ll be happy. But I can’t quite find the value of this project. It scares, sure, but it doesn’t last, and there’s no meat to it. It Comes at Night evaporates far quicker than I expected, lingering only for what it could have been, while what it ultimately is feels as alarmingly opaque as its characters, and as empty as their home.