⚙ A Look Inside London's Museum in Mortal Engines

In the world of Mortal Engines, thousands of years have passed since the Sixty Minute War, the cataclysm that Chudleigh Pomeroy says “took humanity to the brink of extinction.” What survives of our world is no longer understood as ordinary culture. It has become archaeology, religion, junk, treasure, fuel, and weaponry.

That is what makes the London Museum one of the film’s sharpest worldbuilding sets. It is funny, yes, especially when the camera lingers on pop-culture junk treated like sacred relics. But it is also one of the clearest explanations of how broken history has become in the Traction Era. The people of London know the Ancients existed. They know the Ancients built astonishing machines. What they do not fully understand is how ordinary, silly, commercial, and disposable much of that world really was.

The Museum belongs to the Guild of Historians, the same social machine that produces Tom Natsworthy and shelters the cultivated, deeply compromised Thaddeus Valentine. On the surface, the Historians preserve the past. In practice, their museum also shows how easily history becomes propaganda when it is controlled by a predator city. London does not only collect Old-Tech. London eats the past, labels the remains, then uses whatever is useful to keep moving.

The museum is not just a joke about Minions

The most famous gag in the film is the “Deities of Lost America” display. In Philip Reeve’s original novel, people in the future misinterpret statues of Disney characters, especially Mickey Mouse and Pluto, as ancient animal-headed gods. The movie could not use Disney icons, so the filmmakers turned the joke sideways and used the Minions from Despicable Me, a Universal-owned property.

It is easy to read this as a throwaway studio gag, but the joke works because it is exactly the sort of mistake Reeve’s future would make. A mass-produced mascot becomes a sacred idol. A corporate cartoon becomes a god. A piece of advertising becomes evidence of ancient worship. The point is not that future people are stupid. The point is that almost all context has been burned away.

The Old-Tech hiding in plain sight

The London Museum is packed with recognizable fragments from our era. Some are obvious. Others sit in the background like archaeological debris. Look closely and the collection includes smartphones, laptop computers, iPods, televisions, video game consoles, CDs, old screens, skateboards, washing machines, signs, fossil displays, and household appliances.

These objects matter because the film’s world is set so far beyond our present that even recent consumer technology has become mysterious. The production team leaned into that idea. Items from our world were treated as archaeological objects, not nostalgic props. A Nintendo Switch, for example, appears as a strange excavated object rather than a familiar gaming device. Melted laptops and iPods look less like retro tech than relics from a dead civilization.

That idea also explains why the film’s design team resisted calling the world “steampunk.” The cities may be huge, grimy, and mechanical, but the setting is not a Victorian fantasy of the future. It is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction world built from the damaged remains of our own. The museum is the clearest expression of that design logic. Anything from the twenty-first century is ancient. Anything ordinary has become uncanny.

The McDonald’s sign and the religion of consumer junk

One of the sharper background gags is the aged McDonald’s sign. Like the Minions display, it turns modern branding into ancient symbolism. The joke is bleak because it is not really about fast food. It is about the kind of civilization the Ancients left behind. If a future museum had to reconstruct our culture from surviving logos, mascots, and plastic objects, it might conclude that we were ruled by golden arches, cartoon idols, handheld screens, and disposable packaging.

The dinosaur skulls are funny, but they also deepen the timeline

The museum’s fossil displays, including skulls resembling a T-Rex and a Triceratops, add another layer to the joke. London’s historians preserve natural history beside dead consumer tech, as if all of it belongs to the same impossible blur of “before.” Dinosaurs, twentieth-century brands, video games, and nuclear-age weapons are all flattened into one huge lost era.

That is exactly how history often works after catastrophe. The finer distinctions disappear first. Everything before the great rupture becomes “ancient.” In Mortal Engines, that rupture is the Sixty Minute War, the event that broke the old world and left future societies scavenging its bones.

The Bilbo Baggins acorn pin easter egg

One of the neatest production easter eggs is easy to miss. Chudleigh Pomeroy wears an acorn-button pin that matches the acorn button worn by Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit films. It is a small link back to Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth productions, but it also fits Pomeroy beautifully.

Peter Jackson’s own collection helped dress the museum

The museum set also has a pleasingly strange behind-the-scenes detail. Some of the items used to dress the London Museum came from Peter Jackson’s own collection. Jackson is known for his interest in military history, and reporting from the set noted that pieces such as historical material and even the wooden frame of an old First World War aircraft helped give the museum its dense, layered feel.

The lion motif running through London

Another recurring visual detail is the presence of lions. The film uses lion imagery across London, including in connection with the museum. In one darkly funny museum detail, a lion sculpture is treated as if the animal belongs to a lost mythic past. The joke lands because it is both absurd and plausible. In the world after the Sixty Minute War, even familiar animals may have slipped into legend.

The lion motif also suits London’s self-image. This is a predator city that still thinks of itself as noble, imperial, and historically entitled. Lions decorate London because London sees itself as majestic. The museum quietly exposes the lie. A city that devours smaller towns has no real reverence for the past. It only venerates the past when it can be turned into status.

Katherine Valentine’s Nimrod Pennyroyal book

Another lore-friendly easter egg appears when Katherine Valentine is seen with a book by Nimrod Pennyroyal. That name matters to readers of Predator’s Gold, the second novel in the Mortal Engines Quartet. Pennyroyal is one of Philip Reeve’s great frauds, a self-mythologising explorer whose reputation is far grander than his courage or honesty.

It is also a useful nod toward Predator’s Gold, where the wider world of traction cities, floating settlements, and political opportunists expands well beyond London.

The Twinkie gag belongs to the same joke family

The famous old snack gag, where Hester and Tom share what is essentially a preserved relic from the old world, belongs to the same comic tradition as the museum. It plays off the urban legend that Twinkies last forever. In Mortal Engines, the joke becomes even stranger because the snack has survived into a world where nearly everything else has been smashed, burned, dug up, mislabelled, or weaponised.

The gag is silly, but it works because Mortal Engines understands that apocalypse would not preserve only grand monuments. It would also preserve rubbish. Future people might discover our plastic toys, our processed food, our abandoned phones, and our advertising mascots more easily than our philosophy.

Peter Jackson’s wanted poster cameo

Peter Jackson has a small visual cameo in the film through wanted posters displayed on electronic screens around London. It is not specifically a museum prop, but it belongs to the same background-texture approach. The film’s London is full of signage, propaganda, screens, labels, badges, guild symbols, and half-glimpsed jokes. It rewards the viewer who pauses the frame and treats the city itself like a museum exhibit.