Mortal Engines (2018)

Directed by Christian Rivers. Starring Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, Jihae Kim, Leila George, Stephen Lang, Ronan Raftery, Patrick Malahide, Colin Salmon, Andrew Lees, Regé-Jean Page, Frankie Adams, Leifur Sigurdarson, Menik Gooneratne, Sarah Peirse, Kee Chan. [PG-13]

In a distant post-apocalyptic future, a motorized London-on-wheels devours smaller, weaker towns for Darwinistic harvesting purposes; young Hilmar and Sheehan are pursued by the city’s guildmaster Weaving after a couple of botched murder attempts, eventually joining forces with an opposition group called the Anti-Traction League. Epic-scale, superbly-designed production is a feast for the eyes and imagination, an extravaganza of inventive special effects and technology, but it’s populated by thinly-drawn characters and driven by an incessant, unevenly-paced storyline—a strange but promising premise never fully realized. Aside from Lang’s haunting, relentless cyborg stalker, nothing much registers beyond the sheer spectacle and exciting world-building ideas; it’s the sort of steampunk-fantasy world one would love revisiting and exploring at length…just with something more original and/or engaging in the narrative driver’s seat. With everything so rushed and jumbled and overstuffed (Raftery’s character simply disappears around the two-thirds point, never to be mentioned again), it almost certainly would have worked better expanded into two parts or even a trilogy, but considering how unsuccessful the film was at the box office, the completing story chapters would have never made it to the big screen anyway.

61/100