Mortal Engines

It’s an overpowering world of steampunk delights, almost Miyazakian in its presentation. It’s hard to complain about a path being well-worn when all the sights will make your eyes pop.

Mortal Engines is an entertaining movie if you don’t ask to many questions of the story and stick to what’s put in front of you onscreen.

Mortal Engines is visually spectacular, if a bit derivative. It’s a social allegory that goes for broke. And while it’s hardly a groundbreaking movie, it’s still pretty fun.

This is a headache-inducing spectacle that raises more questions than it answers, and does little to inspire viewers to go find the answers themselves. But hey, at least it’s too loud to fall asleep to.

Mortal Engines really is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent slog, as characters leap unfeasibly out of planes on to bits of cities while a squad of rebel-fighter pilots straight out of Star Wars buzz around.

But it looks great, right? Not really. Directed by Christian Rivers, a longtime art director for Jackson, the overall look asks the question, “are you sick of Steampunk yet,” and for me, yeah.

I never would have thought I could get so little amusement out of a film where Hugo Weaving dramatically intones nonsense like “Prepare to ingest!”

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

That was something different, interesting and very exciting. The most exciting figure, even for more depth, is gone too quickly. It is also only characterized very superficially. The antagonist in particular is pretty dull.

Top-tier visual effects and set design. A large amount of resources and creative design went into creating 'London', but sadly this effort doesn't extend too far into the plot and characters.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Started off really well, with some incredibly interesting concepts and a rich back story, and slowly descended into utter anarchy with no discernable logic and events and action, and dialogue that make literally zero sense. There are moments where I felt like I was missing a massive amount of hidden story, there were characters who look at each other or say a line and I feel like there is supposed to be some relationship between them and I'm supposed to know about it. characters make decisions for seemingly no sensible reason, like for example dropping the young girl off in the garden and then flying straight to the weapon that the young girl needed to get to..??? . this asian dissident girl seems to be a big deal and has some heroic death and I have no idea why or who she really is. I really got the sense this must be adapted from some Manga, or a TV series or a really long novel, but the thing is... if you're going to adapt from a larger source material you really need to edit the story so it actually makes sense in a 2 hour film. They did not do a good job with this as it is just a confused mess of garbage. If you can't include a character's backstory in the film, they should not be in the film making a 'meaningful look' before they crash their ship into the big city on wheels. I don't know who that is, and it just makes me feel like I'm not welcome at your party. Awful film that just made me angry.