Movie Review - Mortal Engines

I bet you're wondering why she has that scarf on her. Well... Turns out, it's not that interesting in the end!

Hello everyone and welcome to yet another movie review.

This time I bring you something a bit different. Now, first and foremost I'll have to admit me and Peter Jackson are on a great relationship basis. I mean this man did the amazing Lord Of The Rings (2001 - 2003) , Tin Tin (2011) which I still believe is a great animation adaptation of the comic), King Kong (2005) that brought back that awesome terrifying popcorn monster disaster movie, I mean he's a great director with some amazing projects under his belt.

However... Not all things shine as bright as others!

Lemme start off by saying Mortal Engines (2018) is a fantasy movie. Yes, fantasy. No, it's not some steampunk era. No, it's not post apocalyptic whatever. It's fantasy! Moving cities, flying airships, village in the skies, walled city, this is all (Final) fantasy related stuff. It's the kind of stuff you'd expect from a Zelda (Nintendo - 1986) or Secret of Mana (Square - 1993) RPG adaptation to a movie and it's fine. The problem here is the script!

I mean, I didn't quite understand if the take was explaining the universe as it was, which has little to no explanation whatsoever, or if the take was to tell a tale about the main protagonist in her quest for vengeance or whatnot?! I lost myself because the technology was poorly explain (not to mention the physics or scale of things) and because characters keep appearing (or disappearing) out of nowhere during the movie.

Sure that's all well and fine for a book, where you can give a character a backstory in a few pages but in a movie it has to be either visual or implemented in the story. They tried to do that with a series of hints and even flashbacks but they didn't quite work in the end.

Now, I don't mind having all races in a movie as long as they make sense to some extent, otherwise it almost feels like the a new season of Power Rangers (1993) or the next teenager boys/girl bands are on tour. It's fine for the so called "teenage movies" but here I was expecting something a bit more, I don't know, mature maybe?! And all I got was that Divergent (2014) cast feel. Young, unknown and unexperienced.

I will say this,  I did like Robert Sheehan (who plays the part of Tom Natsworthy) in this movie. I now feel very strongly he would be an excellent Han Solo (if there's still a Star Wars anywhere in the future for "young" Han).

All in all the movie has a lot of faults and misses on it's point of entertaining because of the number of the times we are faced with the "Why is this here?!" or "How would that work?!" feel.

So, I'm sorry to say Peter...

A two out of five.