Mortal Engines Soundtrack – Junkie XL – Album Review

Disc 1

London Suite In C Major
No One You Know
The Chase
Welcome To London
Miss Valentine
This Is For My Mother
The Outlands
A Resurrected Man
Ms. Fang
In a Sea Of Clouds
The Weapons Of The Ancients
Shan Guo
I Am The Meteor
First Strike
Night Sundered
In the Shadow of a Shrine
No Going Back
Windflower
The 13th Floor Elevator
Alive and Together

Say what you will about the Mortal Engines film, one of the real highlights of Peter Jackson’s fantasy epic was its soundtrack. Composed by Junkie XL (Tom Holkenborg), Mortal Engine’s score is a suitably grandiose piece of classical work, boasting a great mix of sombre, slow paced pieces with uptempo, drum-heavy tracks. There’s a whole range of instruments used here too, giving a real feeling of scale throughout this hour long soundtrack.

The general flow of music follows what happens in the film. The beautifully written 8 minute piece London Suite In C Major starts us off with patriotic, brass segments before adding tension with rumbling drums and a big crescendo. This then finishes with strings and the faint echoes of a choir. This, of course, mirrors the chase scene at the start of the film but it also gives a good taste of what’s to come with the soundtrack. From here the album swings back and forth between quiet, melancholy tracks and loud, brass-heavy pieces.

Much like the Lord Of The Rings soundtrack, an ostinato is used for most of the tracks here. Beginning with This Is For My Mother, this melodic segment accompanies the chase and action sequences in the film and this is transferred perfectly to the soundtrack. There’s a general pattern that comes from a lot of the tracks that utilise this too, with most starting relatively slowly before building to a climactic clash of instruments. 

While the Lord Of The Rings soundtrack is about as near to perfect as you could get for a fantasy film soundtrack, Mortal Engines borrows a lot of the same themes and ideas here too. The brass-heavy segments echo the misplaced patriotism from the Londoners in the film and in terms of instrument use and grandeur, Mortal Engines packs an awful lot into its hour long run time.

If you’re looking for a suitably epic soundtrack full of loud, brass segments, rolling drums and a grand sense of adventure, you can’t really go wrong with this soundtrack. At times it’s almost exhausting, chock full of adrenaline-fuelled chases and action but managing to capture the scale of the film perfectly. It’s a bittersweet reminder of what could have been with this fantasy epic but although the film may have been disappointing, its soundtrack is anything but.