2018 - MORTAL ENGINES, great visuals stupid story.

The director/producer Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, bought this series of books about cities actually traveling around the world like they were souped up cars or something, he clearly hoped to turn the books into another film franchise.  Frankly the plot of the first book Mortal Engines is just plain stupid.  After some sort of apocalyptic war, cities called "Traction Cities" race around in what is left of the world gobbling up smaller traction cities and using them for fuel.

Once you get past the basic silliness of this setting you have to settle for what is essentially a rehash of story elements from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi and The Terminator.  A teenage couple travel around in what's left of the world as they attempt to stop the Darth Vader stand-in, in this case the actor Hugo Weaving, who is building a Death Star like destructo ray to blow up stuff.  The couple is pursued by some kind of robot guy who is clearly a stand-in for the T-800 Terminator.  After a lot of explosions the question is will the teenage couple succeed?  

 

What the film has going for it are the special effects talents of Peter Jackson's WETA studio, the same bunch that did the effects for his Middle Earth series.  They certainly are talented artists.  Unfortunately that's about all this expensive film has going for it.  In a film like this the cast is secondary to all the special effects and action. Mortal Engines failed to find an audience probably because no one watching the film was engaged in the plights of the actors.  

 

Peter Jackson chose to sit this film out and turned over the directing duties to his visual effects supervisor Christian Rivers.  Probably as good a choice as anyone since the film is just completely loaded down with some amazing visuals.  But anyway you cut it the film as a piece of storytelling is a flop.

Written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens with a heavy borrowing the the George Lucas Star Wars series.

The running time is 128 minutes.