I watched an advance screening: it is bad (spoilers)

* This film has a whole slew of influences, like "Snowpiercer", "The Terminator", "Into The Badlands", "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" and "Howl's Moving Castle" and somehow manages to distill them into a puddle of Young Adult mush. After the film ended, someone sitting in the cinema remarked loudly that "Mortal Engines" felt like someone had just fed a list of existing movie scripts into a script-writing program.

* Peter Jackson acts as producer and co-writer, alongside Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. And the script is terrible. The action jumps from location-to-location, subplots are extremely clunky, the dialogue is cumbersome (none of the lead actors sell it besides Hugo Weaving), and various characters are underwritten or completely forgotten about (particularly Valentine's daughter and Bevis).

* From a visual perspective, there is a noticeable difference between the CGI-heavy wide shots of the mobile "cities" (which look great) and the close-up / interior shots (which just look like moderately-budgeted film sets). The two never gel into a cohesive whole. We also never get a real sense of scale of the cities from the street-level.

* This $100m film is badly directed by Jackson's long-time collaborator and high school friend Christian Rivers.

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