In Mortal Engines, a movie populated by strange and unique characters, Stephen Lang’s resurrected man, Shrike, is the strangest of all. Mortal Engines, adapted from the books by Philip Reeve, unfolds in a steampunk sci-fi world that’s running out of resources. Major cities have been turned into mobile, roaming “Traction Cities,” with London as the biggest city of them all. London is ruled by a ruthless group of elites who will stop at nothing to maintain control, particularly Alexander Valentine (Hugo Weaving).
One of those weapons at his disposal is a Stalker hunter named Shrike (Stephen Lang), whose frightening and bizarre visage belies his depth. Over the course of Mortal Engines‘ run time, Shrike’s backstory is slowly revealed, making him a tragic figure despite his introduction as a villain. Though Mortal Engines, which unfortunately bombed at the box office, simplifies Shrike and the Stalkers in general, he’s nonetheless one of Mortal Engines‘ most fascinating characters.
Shrike enters the movie as a villain, a relentless assassin and bounty hunter turned loose by Alexander Valentine to track down and kill Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar). The movie takes quite a few liberties from the books, changing some elements drastically, but Shrike is one of the few characters who remains largely intact. He’s just as single-minded and ruthless as he is in the novels, determined to pursue Hester in order to force her to keep a promise she made to him.
Years before, when Valentine killed Hester’s mother, Shrike took Hester in and raised her. Seeing her grief and rage over the loss of her mother, Shrike offered to make Hester a Stalker like him to free her of her memories and her emotions, including her pain, thinking they’d be together forever as father and surrogate daughter. When Hester ran away to pursue her mission of revenge against Valentine, she broke her promise to Shrike to become a Stalker. Valentine then uses Shrike’s rage over Hester’s broken promise as it makes the Stalker useful, with the villain knowing full well Shrike won’t stop until he’s hunted Hester down and solved Valentine’s problem for him.
Despite being a formidable bounty hunter, Shrike, and all Stalkers, have a brutal and gruesome origin story in the Mortal Engines story. Part Frankenstein’s monster and part cyborg, Stalkers are a specialized force of programmable soldiers. In the lore of the world, the bodies of dead soldiers are harvested and corpses implanted with “Old Tech” machinery to bring them back to life like a rebooted computer, thus earning their other name of “Resurrected Men.”
The desecration of their corpses didn’t stop there, however. The internal organs of Stalkers were also removed and replaced with more machinery or weapons. In the process of being resurrected, Stalkers’ emotions, memories, and desires are eradicated, with their memories only resurfacing as tangled snippets devoid of personal feeling and connection. Shrike was famously an anomaly in this regard as he formed an attachment to Hester and remembered pieces of his life. Once resurrected, Stalkers live only to serve the will of their masters and those who give them orders. Once given an order, however, a Stalker is utterly ruthless in its pursuit.
In both the books and in the movie, Shrike is a legend among Stalkers due to his kill record and his aberrant nature of being able to remember pieces of his past life. The first time he catches up to Hester and Tom (Robert Sheehan), they escape Shrike’s clutches with the help of Anna Fang (Jihae). The second time, however, he suffers severe wounds during their fight and has an epiphany when Hester begs him not to kill Tom.
As he succumbs to his wounds, Shrike realizes that Hester loves Tom and that it gives her a human reason to live. He releases her from her vow to him to become a Stalker, giving her a necklace he found with her when he found her as a child. In his final moments in Mortal Engines, Shrike relieves his past life and his life with Hannah. In a very Citizen Kane “Rosebud” moment, Shrike’s last word is Hannah’s name.