Mortal Engines (2018)

There's a moment early in Mortal Engines where you see a massive, rumbling city on enormous mechanical tracks, chasing down and literally devouring a smaller town whole, grinding it up for parts and fuel. It's one of the most visually audacious things I've seen in a big-budget blockbuster in years. My jaw dropped. And then the characters started talking, and it all began to fall apart.

That tension, between extraordinary world-building and deeply ordinary storytelling, defines every single minute of this film. The production design is genuinely phenomenal. Steampunk architecture stacked hundreds of metres high, rusted industrial machinery on a colossal scale, a post-apocalyptic wasteland stretching to the horizon with a kind of grimy, lived-in texture that feels earned rather than painted on. You can see the thought and craft poured into making this world feel real. I kept wanting to pause and just look around in it.

But you can't live in a world if you don't care about the people inhabiting it. And that's where Mortal Engines falls flat on its face.

The story tries to juggle a teen romance, a revenge arc, an ancient superweapon, a class struggle and some fairly pointed commentary about consumption and resource exploitation, all at once, and it manages none of them with any conviction. There's a potentially interesting idea buried in here about what it means to survive by devouring everything around you, about cities and civilisations that can only sustain themselves by destroying others. It's right there. You can almost reach it. But the script keeps skating past it in favour of the next CGI set-piece or the next clunky exchange of dialogue. The themes about predatory capitalism and imperial appetite are touched on, then immediately dropped the second someone needs to run across a rooftop.

The pacing is genuinely uneven, scenes that should land with emotional weight just sort of… happen, and then we're on to the next thing. The dialogue has a habit of stating exactly what characters are feeling rather than letting any of it breathe. And for a film with this much spectacle on screen, there's a startling absence of tension. I was never worried. I was never moved. I was occasionally impressed by a wide shot, and then immediately reminded that I didn't care what happened to anyone standing in it.

The comparison that kept nagging at me was Mad Max: Fury Road, another post-apocalyptic action epic built around wild vehicular carnage and a world that feels genuinely lived in. But Fury Road never lets the spectacle outrun the humanity. Every explosion means something. Every character choice carries weight. Mortal Engines has the scale and the ambition but none of that grounding, and the difference between the two films is the difference between watching something and feeling something.

To be fair, this isn't outright terrible. It's not incompetent. The people making it clearly believed in it, and there are stretches where the sheer imagination on display is enough to carry you along for a few minutes. If you're the sort of person who can get genuine pleasure purely from extraordinary production design, there's something here for you. I can respect the ambition even as I mourn what it failed to become.

But a film can't run on concept alone. And once the novelty of giant rolling cities wears off, which it does quicker than you'd hope, you're left with a muddled story, flat characters and a runtime that outstays its welcome by a fair margin. It's the kind of film that's clearly trying to launch a franchise, and yet somehow forgets to make you want more. Gorgeous to look at. Painful to sit through.

Two and a half stars. Save your credits for something with actual momentum.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2018  | Watched: 2025-11-11

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video 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
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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