MORTAL ENGINES: PETER JACKSON’S NEW FILM LOOKS SUBLIME…

New movie looks to see Kiwi reclaim his place as the world’s best large-scale storyteller.

Universal has released a unique first trailer for “Mortal Engines,” depicting a world of predator cities existing thousands of years after current civilization has been destroyed by a cataclysmic event.

“We have to stop London before it destroys us” is one of the lines in the FX-heavy footage.

Peter Jackson is on board as a producer and screenwriter, re-teaming with “Hobbit” screenwriters with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens in “Mortal Engines,” set in a steampunk world where entire cities have been mounted on wheels and prey on one another. It’s Jackson’s first feature project since the completion of the Hobbit trilogy in 2014.

With the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson forever embiggened large-scale filmmaking. Those films contained the massivest set-pieces ever seen in a movie, but Jackson and his collaborators were nevertheless able to artfully infuse them with recognisable human emotion, grounding the gargantuan storytelling like no one ever had before.

Robert Sheehan stars as museum apprentice Tom Natsworthy from the city of London who finds himself fighting for his own survival after he encounters the dangerous fugitive assassin Hester Shaw, played by Hera Hilmar, who’s out to avenge the death of her mother.

They forge an unlikely alliance that is destined to change the course of the future. Hugo Weaving, Jihae, Ronan Raftery, Leila George, Patrick Malahide, and Stephen Lang also star.

We spend most of our time with Icelandic actor Hera Hilmar, and I’m already very invested in her character’s quest for vengeance against a classically-villainous Hugo Weaving.

Misfits star Robert Sheehan (who confusingly also starred in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones) appears to be the next-most-important character, and they both get flushed down a giant toilet in my absolute favourite moment of the trailer.

Indeed, all the mechanics on display in this trailer are dizzyingly impressive, and slick enough to avoid the obvious steampunk label showing up. There’s plenty to behold in the trailer beyond the “traction cities” as they are known, with a lot of the latter parts taking place up in the sky.

“Mortal Engines,” directed by Christian Rivers, was shot entirely in New Zealand. The Universal and MRC movie is adapted from the book series by Philip Reeve, published in 2001.

If you haven’t read the books yet, then you are missing out. The books are great, and the film adaptation looks promising!