Check out the Peter Jackson written and produced sci-fi flick Mortal Engines… note the marketing wants you to think he directed it too but he didn’t. The guy who did is one of his FX collaborators on various Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. It’s also based on a series of YA novels which I haven’t read but I’m guessing all the money and time put into this movie suggests there was something worth reading in them. Too bad whatever that was didn’t translate to the movie.

So Mortal Engines is set a thousand years after a quantum bomb apocalypse that cracked the earth or something. Now, these many years later, the world is divided between traction and static cities (and maybe floating cities). The traction cities are entire cities somehow mounted onto giant tank treads who drive around and… I dunno… they drive around. Particularly large cities – Predator Cities like London – capture and break down smaller cities for fuel, ancient tech, resources, and people (I guess). They hate static cities which have the audacity to not drive around (I guess).

It’s a big idea for world building and visual FX. That’s about all the movie is though. There’s a plot and there a half dozen characters running around who don’t have much personality and are not really establishes well enough to care about. This is one of the movies where there’s always visual flair and action but I never once cared about the characters or why they are doing any of this… so it becomes visual noise. Like a Transformers movie. It’s not quite as boring as some of the visual noise flicks but its also not as nuts and so-bad-its-funny like Valerian and Jupiter Rising. In other words, I was distracted and a little bored but not crushingly bored but also not marveling at the wrong-headed weirdness. It was just too pedestrian to enjoy even ironically.

The idea of mile long cities on tank treads is not particularly logical and probably works conceptually in a book but kind of gets distracting when made visual. Plus there’s a problem with scale… the cities move and turn so fast they don’t FEEL massive. Plus the human actors are working on so much green screen, you can tell they have no idea they are (for example) running next to fifty foot tall treads or evading giant buzz saws or whatever.

There’s no reason to see this film. It’s loud and noisy and they clearly spent a LOT of money on it, but it’s ultimately a dull misfire full of half-hearted attempts at character. There’s better bad movies to see or, hey, better good movies to see. Or maybe a better book to read? I dunno. This flick just failed.

Score: 64