Thank you guys!
Yeah this has probably been my most challenging client to date. Not least of all because of the extra layers of orchestral stuff, but for days on end I was just like "WHERE THE FUCK DO I START?!?!". I kept mixing it, remixing it, tweaking it, then one day after not approaching it for a couple of days I just scrapped everything and started again, then kinda nailed it in one go.
I replaced the kick with something really dynamic-less and one-dimensional, and I think that really helped in a weird adverse way. To get any sort of aggression and dirtiness out of such 'nice' music I just wanted one element of it to sound almost robotic. I've always been fond of really blatantly-triggered kicks (Fear Factory etc) and tried to incorporate that into this.