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Ostrich

Edgar Williams

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Book

In many senses the ostrich looms large - the tallest and heaviest of any living bird, a fully grown...

Wonderputt

Games

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App

Award winning Adventure Golf with cows, toads, ski slopes, torpedoes and a sprinkle of alien...

The Wangs vs. the World

Jade Chang

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Book

A hilarious debut novel about a wealthy but fractured Chinese immigrant family that had it all, only...

Awix (3310 KP) rated Mortal Engines (2018) in Movies

Apr 5, 2019

Mortal Engines (2018)

2018 | Fantasy, Sci-Fi

6.7

(57 Ratings)

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Another lavish dystopian YA adaptation with first-class art direction but a really thin story and bland characterisation. In a strange (and somewhat improbable) future world, lack of resources has forced cities and towns to mobilise themselves and wander the landscape on wheels and caterpillar tracks, preying on smaller habitations. Someone has an evil plan to do something or other, but this bit is quite forgettable.

Probably the main problem with this film for me was that it put me in mind of many great, quirky SF and fantasy stories (Brazil, Cities in Flight, Inverted World) without having more than a fraction of their narrative boldness: good-looking but forgettable characters wander about going through the motions of hackneyed character arcs, while lots of boxes get ticked but hardly anything surprising happens. It's actually quite an achievement for a movie which opens with London pursuing a small German town across country to wind up being quite as forgettably boring as this one does. Not sure if the books are any better, but this certainly qualifies as a huge waste of potential.