Mortal Engines (2018)

1000 years in the future, after a “quantum apocalypse,” giant wheeled cities roam the earth, consuming each other for resources. 
Somehow.

I’m sure you have many questions about this, which is fair. 
I do too, and none of them were answered.

Based on the second half of the very first sentence, you might be thinking that the big cities “eat” the little cities and use their scrap metal to reinforce their own infrastructure, or harvest any biomass for hydroponic gardens, or somehow add the smaller city to the mass of the larger one like a mechanical reverse amoeba.
You’d be wrong on all counts.
The one time when London (yes, the capital city of the U.K.) consumed the town of Salthook, London’s “digestion” process simply shredded Salthook with giant chainsaws and then incinerated or dumped out anything that wasn’t explicitly fuel or “old tech.” 
Or people.

Despite being a world where once-stationary entities have suddenly found themselves mobile and feast on others, there’s an inexplicable belief in the value of human life and that war and violence should be avoided at all costs.
Except for the police with guns. And everyone having knives. And the human slave trade. And the cannibalism.

The fuel sources in this were never clarified. Salthook had a giant tank full of salt for some reason, which they dumped while getting chased by London as they seemed to believe the London was after said salt and that dumping the load would make them an undesirable target, but London still consumed it, then just... chugged along?
The massive (mostly CGI) setpieces were clearly designed to look somewhat steam-punk-y, which is fine, but that would require you to show me that things were powered by steam. London appeared to be entirely powered by the waste of other entities. No coal plants were shown, and the concepts of solar panels and wind turbines were lost to the ages as well, and clearly the machines weren’t nuclear-powered or there wouldn’t be an energy shortage that required London to eat other locales. 
There were dirigibles, which were just about the only vehicle that fit the steam-punk motif, but there were also airships of magical design that simply should have fallen out of the sky. They weren’t aerodynamic and they were all powered by jet engines that relied on the bright colors of neon gasses to get them airborne.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the technology simply didn’t make sense.
I’m willing to bite off on the idea that the tech we’re used to today got lost with time and that without the appropriate manufacturing facilities, humanity never recovered to the point we’re at now.
Fine.
What’s not fine is the magic airship engines, or the floating city, or the mega-structure facilities (and the even more monstrous metal foundries that would have been required to make them) that roamed Europe to make the plot happen.

There were two leads in this unfortunate slag heap: Tom (Robert Sheehan) and Hester (Hera Hilmer). Tom was a foolishly naive native of London with a stupid backstory and a bottom-of-the-barrel position as a member of the Guild of Historians. Hester was an orphan who spontaneously learned how to be an assassin while being raised by a zombie robot killing machine.
At one point Hester said “You never head south in the outlands, not ever,” but never gave any context to what that meant or why south was apparently a death sentence. 
I really, really wanted Tom to die. And he should have, repeatedly.

Pandora, Hester’s mom (who I don’t care to look up), was an archaeologist who was killed while working by herself at a dig site. Somehow, that earned her a reputation amongst revolutionaries, or terrorists, or whomever we were supposed to be rooting for.

Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving) got the coolest name in the story, which is a shame, because his character might as well have just said “I’m the bad guy and I’ll be dead by the end credits” as his opening line.
Hugo Weaving must be desperate for roles to have accepted this one.

Anna Fang (Jihae) looked like an anime character come to life. She was androgynous, had stupid hair, had stupid sunglasses, had a vaguely-martial-arts style fighting technique that prevented her from getting shot by bullets while stabbing someone else, and had the ability to show up exactly whenever the plot required her to save the protagonists.
While the Wikipedia page said she existed as a character in the book series this was based on, her existence as a character in this movie simply felt like a persistent Deus Ex Machina.

There was the “Anti-Tractionist League,” who were a group of stupid people who were for some reason fighting against the existence of the giant “tract cities” of which London was one.
It was never clarified why these people hated the rolling cities, as the citizens of the consumed cities were simply absorbed into the population of the larger entity, and no resources were ever shown to actually be consumed, despite the impossible power requirements necessary to make those things move.

Oh, and of course: if the cities simply sat in place, they could have redirected all of the energy from the engines to doing things like powering homes.

There is the one credit I can give: in many post-apocalyptic movies based on young-adult novels, there’s a tendency to say “America collapsed!” while aggressively ignoring the existence of the other 7.2 billion people and hundreds of other countries on Earth. You can see examples of this in “The Hunger Games” (2012), “Ready Player One” (2018), and “Divergent” (2014).
Here they explained that the U.S.A. - and, presumably, the rest of North and South America - was so badly damaged in the “quantum apocalypse” that it’s considered devoid of life and was dubbed “the dead continent.” Meanwhile, Europe and the two poles (???) developed the weird roll-about cities, while Asia (read: China) and Africa simply decided to keep building and functioning like humanity has always done.
It’s a stupid explanation and I hate it, but at least they tried.

Just in case you were wondering: the “quantum apocalypse” was never explained. It was clearly the shortest route necessary to get an answer to “what’s worse than ‘nuclear’?”
One scene showed a quantum weapon behaving like a dozen atomic bombs, while another showed it creating a black hole. Clearly it didn’t really matter and no one cared for consistency.

I don’t know which studios funded this movie, but it very clearly got a large financial kick from China. All of the bad guys were “western” while the peaceful, non-rolling-city folks of Shan Guo were ostensibly “Asian,” but clearly supposed to be future-China.
When facing down an imminent, frontal attack from London, the Governor of Shan Guo made a statement that was approximately “We value life, but we’ll kill anyone - including innocent people - if our sovereignty is threatened.”
I get it: war is terrible. Nuclear weapons and drone strikes don’t just kill the bad guys.
But for such a painfully-clear stand-in for China to make a statement like that in relation to an attack from “the west,” the message was more than a little on-the-nose.

To add to that: the code name for the “quantum” weapon was “M.E.D.U.S.A.,” as in the gorgon from Greek mythology. The acronym was never explained, the weapon didn’t involve snakes, and I can only tangentially make it fit the “turn people to stone” part of the lore. 
Anyway: The MEDUSA weapons system, which Valentine managed to perfectly reconstruct with thousand-year-old hardware, had a “kill key,” which was a glorified USB drive. When plugged into the special port on the command system, the lettering on the outside of the drive and the hardware matched up to say “MEDUSA.” However, when the key was separate, it only said “USA.” 
No way that’s pointed. Nope. Not pointed at all.

The scenery for this wasn’t great. Watching giant wheeled cities race across the landscape was entertaining the first time, but the CGI to render it all was mediocre at best, and the more cities they showed, they less good they looked. 
For a world that was steam punk instead of fantasy or even straight-up magic, the machinery was impossible to even pretend to accept as plausible.

The sound track was simply trash. The stuff that was clearly supposed to be epic swells for intense scenes was just meh. There was nothing good about it, none of the pieces were worth listening to or remembering.

This movie was based on a quartet of young-adult science-fiction novels from 2001.
As the plot to a series of kids books, all of the above would have been just peachy. Kids don’t care about plot holes, or shoddy world-building, or two-dimensional character development, or painfully shoe-horned geopolitical commentary.
As a movie, however, this was absolutely horrible, because it compressed all four books’ worth of story into one film without bothering to fill in any of those critical gaps that kids simply don’t look for.

There’s a fine line between having an incredibly simple plot while stupid things happen in order to get you there, like “Kung Pow” (2001), versus simply having a plot that’s driven by nothing more than the fact that something needs to happen next to justify a 128 minute run-time for theatrical release, sans any connecting tissue or development or anything else a movie should have.

I wanted to be able to tell you to watch this with friends to riff on it, in that “it’s so bad it’s good” category.
But it’s not.
It’s just bad. So so bad. There’s no development beyond “This guy is evil. See him? See how he looks evil? He’s evil. See this other guy? See how he looks good? Good. He’s good.” Boom. That’s it. I’ve just given all of the development for everything as much thought as the director and script-writers did.
Don’t waste your time. 
Don’t even give it a second glance when it pops up on a Redbox screen or an airplane infotainment system.