Title: Mortal Engines (12A)
Year: 2018
Running Time: 128 minutes
Director: Christian Rivers
Cast: Hera Hilmar (Hester Shaw), Robert Sheehan (Tom Natsworthy), Hugo Weaving (Thaddeus Valentine)
Notes: Won one award
Rating: 5
Thoughts: In a future world people live in mobile cities and the largest try to consume the smallest. An assassin tries to kill the Head of the Guild of Historians just after London has absorbed its latest prize.
There's a lot of "from the makers of the Lord of the Rings" about this and whilst the premise from the source material is interesting, and the plot within this a strong enough idea, it falls flat really.
It looks decent enough but the story just feels a bit too linear and, in the end, predictable. A bad guy, masquerading at times as good, wants to control everything and two ordinary people must stop him. It's very familiar.
It all just ends up being about the entertainment and action and too little energy is spent on the characters. Weaving is instructed to just play a cliche and the others all bounce around it. We need to see the assassin's motives in greater depth, as an example.
As just a pure blast it does its job, I suppose, but I do think they have taken strong source material and then failed to deliver the detail required. The world it is set in is just that, a setting, and there is too little explored in the motives of all involved.