Sunday my sweetie wife and I went out and caught a screening for Mortal Engines, a post-apocalyptic released by Peter Jackson and his Wingnut production company with a script adapted by Lord of The Rings scribes, Fran Walsh, Philipa Boyens, and Jackson himself, from a series of novel by Philip Reeve.

Now, you might think with an illustrious production history and talent such as these Mortal Engines, even if based upon the patently ridiculous concept of mobile predatory cities, would be exciting and deeply engaging, but you would me wrong. I sat through the films running time of 128 minutes deeply bored. I was prepared to accept the mobile cities concept, after all it was central to the premise as given by the trailers, but the movie failed to generate any emotional engagement.

The characters are all fairly flat and even Hugo Weaving, who made his scenes in the abysmal remake of The Wolfman entertaining, was unable to bring his character to any semblance of life. Everyone’s motivation is of the simplest type and when the story does try to deploy a shocking reveal to shake up the narrative, one that comes so close to the end it can have little bearing on the plot, it is a ‘twist’ that can only remind you of a better film that fused science-fiction and fantasy. (I shall not give away the twist in a spoiler, lest you find the film fresh and engaging but you’ll know what I am talking about when you see it.)

Okay, so Mortal Engines has stock characters and an over the top concept but perhaps the actual mechanism of the plot will be engaging but that is not the case either. The film is constructed from a series of chases, but chases that unlike say Mad Max: Fury Road do not have any emotional and thematic weight. The character escape one spot of peril only to land in other bit of trouble that is unrelated to the either their choices, their natures, or the driving conflict of the plot. Amplifying the boredom and bad narrative construct if that all too often the character are quickly rescued from their peril by turns of sudden good fortune. It is not that we see these characters are skilled, deeply intelligent, or out of the box creative, but simply that over and over again they are lucky. In the end the resolution of the crisis comes not from the nature of their choices, hell the characters are never faced with anything amounting to a difficult or morally troubling choice, but rather from the luck of having the right McGuffin to stick in the right slot at the right time.

Even with all of these faults the film might have still been worth it if it had been fun, if the producers, writers, and actors had infused it with a sense of joy. I am reminded of Flash Gordon from 1980. A deeply silly movie, stock, flat characters, a nonsense plot, but the movie was fun and 38 years later it is still quoted and is part of the public’s memory because it was fun.Mortal Engines has none of that.

In my opinion there is nothing recommend this movie.