Mortal Engines (2018)
★★½ — Mortal Engines (2018)
Mortal Engines arrives as one of the more ambitious science fiction spectacles of the late 2010s, adapting Philip Reeve's 2001 novel of the same name. Reeve's book, the first in his Mortal Engines Quartet, introduced the concept of "traction cities": vast, mechanised urban machines that pursue and consume one another across a ravaged future Earth, operating under a philosophy called Municipal Darwinism. It was a vivid, original piece of young adult fiction with a devoted readership, and a film adaptation had been in development for years before it finally reached screens in December 2018. The production is a New Zealand and American co-venture, brought to life under the banner of Universal Pictures alongside Scholastic Productions and Silvertongue Films, with much of the work carried out in New Zealand, a country that has proven itself a reliable home for ambitious fantasy and science fiction filmmaking (as anyone who has spent time with King Kong (2005) or the comic vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows (2014) will already know).
The film marks the directorial debut of Christian Rivers, a visual effects and storyboard artist who had worked closely with Peter Jackson across several productions. Jackson serves here as a producer and co-writer of the screenplay alongside Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the same writing team behind much of Jackson's previous work. Rivers, then, is stepping into a large set of shoes with considerable support behind him, and the production's scale reflects that backing. The world-building on screen is the result of extensive design work, with entire civilisations, factions, and histories constructed around the central premise of a mobile London grinding across a barren wasteland. For fans of post-apocalyptic world-building, comparisons to the kinetic fury of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) are probably inevitable, though the two films take quite different approaches to their respective wastelands.
Leading the film are Hera Hilmar and Robert Sheehan, playing a scarred young woman from the wastelands and a junior historian aboard the city of London respectively, two characters whose lives collide in ways that set the broader plot in motion. Hugo Weaving, a reliable presence in large-scale genre cinema, plays the story's primary antagonist, bringing his customary polished but unremarkable authority to the role. Jihae and Ronan Raftery fill out the principal cast, the former as a resistance fighter operating beyond the traction cities' reach. The assembled cast is not without talent, and several of them have proven themselves in other contexts, which makes the film's shortcomings all the more curious when you consider what was assembled on paper.
Mortal Engines (2018) is a film caught between two worlds, one of breathtaking visual ambition and another of dull, lifeless storytelling. On the surface, it’s stunning: giant mobile cities rumbling across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, devouring smaller towns for resources, all rendered with incredible detail and scale. The production design is phenomenal, steampunk meets dystopia in a way that feels fresh and imaginative. You can’t deny the effort poured into making this world feel real. But beyond the spectacle there’s almost nothing. The story is a muddled mess (teen romance, revenge arcs, ancient superweapons) all stitched together without tension or emotional weight. The dialogue is clunky, the pacing uneven, and the deeper themes about consumption and survival are touched on but never explored. It’s not "bad", just entirely missable. You watch it for the concept, then realize you don’t care what happens to anyone. As a cinematic experience it's underwhelming. A would-be epic that forgets to bring heart, soul, or even decent acting. Gorgeous to look at, painful to sit through. Save your credits for something with actual momentum.
For me, that tension between visual invention and narrative emptiness is genuinely frustrating, because the raw material is there. The concept of cities eating cities is the kind of idea that should carry a film on its own energy, and there are moments, usually when the cameras pull back to show the scale of it all, where you get a flicker of what this could have been. But a striking image is not the same as a story worth following, and I kept finding myself admiring the set dressing while completely losing the thread of why any of it mattered. If you are the sort of person who can enjoy a film purely as a visual exercise and switch your investment in the characters off entirely, there is probably something here for you. For everyone else, it is a polished but hollow two hours. Sometimes the most impressive-looking films leave the least impression.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-11-11
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Mortal Engines (2018) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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