Mortal Engines On the Move

Thousands of years in the future, almost all of Earth is a wasteland. Food, water, and other materials are scarce. People live in cities mounted on giant wheels. These megacities roam the countryside hunting and consuming smaller cities to take their resources. This fantastic world of Mortal Engines will rumble into theaters this month.

But turning the book by Philip Reeve into a movie was a big job. (The Mortal Engines series was published by Scholastic, which also publishes Scholastic MATH.) Filmmaker Peter Jackson, of The Lord of the Rings fame, used 70 different movie sets and special effects to create this futuristic world. And the action isn’t just on land—some of these “hungry cities” can fly or rove the seas like submarines!