Peter Jackson has cemented himself as an epic filmmaker with bringing his vision of The Lord of The Rings and Hobbit film series to the big screen. Sometime back he unleashed a teaser to his next epic Mortal Engines starring Hugo Weaving, Hera Hilmar and Robert Sheehan, but does it bring something new, original and epic to the big screen or will run out of steam?

​

Mortal Engines follows thousands of years after civilization was destroyed by a cataclysmic event, where humankind has adapted and a new way of living has evolved. Gigantic moving cities now roam the Earth, ruthlessly preying upon smaller traction towns. Tom Natsworthy who hails from a Lower Tier of the great traction city of London and finds himself fighting for his own survival after he encounters the dangerous fugitive Hester Shaw. Two opposites, whose paths should never have crossed, forge an unlikely alliance that is destined to change the course of the future. I was not overly excited about this film and the trailers didn’t bring much more to it, but I will admit that the strange idea itself was intriguing. As someone that never read the book I knew nothing about this story and to be honest I feel like I still don’t know much more.

​

The film kicks off pretty epic with the same city on wheels chase sequence from the first trailer setting the tone of it all and I was all in. Sadly from there it kind of gets klunky and all over the place. Anytime the film deals with the action or giant mobile cities it is pretty awesome and screams that epic feel meshing things like the Road Warrior and steam punk, but there is sadly not enough of these elements to keep it from getting lost on itself with little to no overall purpose. There are characters that roam in and out of the story almost forgotten about making some elements left unresolved. Usually I would look at this as build up to more films, but these weren’t important enough elements to really matter in the bigger scope just more wasting time and served little to no purpose.

​

​