First photos and trailer: It's city-eat-city in Peter Jackson's 'Mortal Engines'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Big cities roll in the dystopian adventure 'Mortal Engines' Young allies come together and big cities like London roll along in producer Peter Jackson's expansive dystopian adventure 'Mortal Engines.'

When London’s calling in the epic adventure Mortal Engines, you'd best get out of the way.

Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning mastermind behind The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, is spearheading the upcoming adaptation (in theaters Dec. 14) of Philip Reeve’s 2001 young-adult dystopian novel. Set a few thousand years into a post-apocalyptic future, the movie introduces a world where nations no longer exist and huge metropolises on wheels gobble up smaller towns for their resources.

“It was a damn good read of a story that didn’t remind me of anything else I’d ever read before,” says Jackson, who nabbed the rights to Reeve’s four-book series in 2005 and is a producer and co-writer on Mortal Engines. (Christian Rivers, a visual-effects supervisor on Rings and unit director on Hobbit, takes the director’s chair here for his first feature.)

The film centers on the journey of — and growing relationship between — museum apprentice Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan) and fugitive assassin Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar).

Tom is a twentysomething Londoner who’s only ever lived inside his traveling hometown, and his feet have never touched grass, mud or land. His first taste of the outside comes quite abruptly: Tom gets in the way of the masked Hester's attempt to kill Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), a powerful sort she blames for her mother’s murder, and both Hester and Tom end up thrown out of the moving "traction" city and on their own.

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For Tom, “it's an alien environment,” Jackson says. “He’s never heard the silence of the world without engines. The moving decks of London are a much more secure place for him, as far as he’s concerned.”

He’s also forced to deal with the mysterious Hester, a disfigured girl raised by Shrike (Stephen Lang), the last of an undead battalion of soldiers known as Stalkers, who were war casualties reanimated with machine parts.

Hester's "a crazy, animalistic, flawed beast" and, because of her facial scarring, she "feels so different, in a way like damaged goods," Hilmar says. Although she doesn't like Tom or want to get to know him, he ultimately becomes key to Hester "becoming human again."

Visual spectacle abounds, from flying towns like Airhaven that house the resistance group the Anti-Traction League (including Hester and Tom's pilot ally, Anna Fang, played by South Korean singer Jihae) to breakneck ground-and-pound, city-on-city action that would make Mad Max jealous.

"Peter always really likes to push the boundaries and, with all due respect, go quite excessive in certain areas, which is why so many people love his films," Rivers says. "At the end of the day, you want to draw on all the strengths but also create your own creative vision."

While Rings and Hobbit took advantage of lush New Zealand greenery to bring Middle-earth to life, 70 sets were built to craft Mortal Engines' end-of-the-world look, one where a cataclysmic superweapon has destroyed civilization, caused continents to shift and forced mankind to go mobile. “You’ve got these giant track treads that have scarred the landscape, and as the landscape tries to regrow, these traction cities keep rolling over it," Rivers says.

Chief among them is London, which features modern and slightly futuristic architecture with familiar elements of the old British city. Its crowning achievement is St. Paul's Cathedral perched on top, and Jackson looked at ancient sites like the Acropolis of Athens and Colosseum in Rome to apply the same sort of weathering.

"Even though some of these are familiar London landmarks, they aren’t quite as we know them now because so much time has passed," Jackson says.

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Jackson acknowledges that he’s usually “not that keen” on dystopian films (“Generally, they show a depressing world you would never want to actually live in”) but makes an exception for Mortal Engines. “Being on a city that moves about and has shops, theaters, power, lights and fun stuff? It’s not a 1984 George Orwell thing — it’s got an attractiveness to it in a whole different way.”