I saw this movie on the plane while I was on a business trip.
Never heard of it before, after watching the trailer, I was completely attracted by its visual style and setting.
The overall style is probably between steampunk and diesel punk, mainly steampunk.
The concept of a mobile city, from a setting point of view, is very appealing.
Intellectually, a very large ground vehicle is an unlikely thing. Limited by the strength of the material, and the maintainability of the mechanical system, the super-large ground vehicle does not have the kind of majestic power it has on its surface, instead, it is a relatively fragile and slow thing. NASA has a ground vehicle dedicated to transporting rockets. It can transport the assembled rocket vertically from the assembly plant to the launch pad (of course, the distance between the two is not very far). This machine is very slow and extremely troublesome to maintain and repair.
While this may not seem so feasible in reality, in fantasy works, from the moving castle in Howl's Moving Castle to the desert aircraft carrier in Homeworld: Karak Desert, super-large ground vehicles are a A wonderful romantic thing. It naturally has the feeling of wandering and wandering, but at the same time it has the warmth of home and the powerful sense of power.
When the world is not just one or two super-large vehicles, but the life of human beings is completely realized around super-large vehicles, this kind of feeling that is different from reality, but inextricably linked, really makes people feel fascinated.
When the hero and heroine hide in the crawler tracks pressed out of the "London" Mobile City, this "realism brought by detailed settings" can gradually immerse the audience into the world described by the plot.
However, it has to be said that although Hollywood screenwriters can construct qualified industrial scripts. But the "pipeline" flavor of this type of script is always very heavy (of course, it is not excluded that the original work did not do a good job of the whole plot). Hugo Weaving's role is not three-dimensional enough, and some actions lack sufficient motivation. The entire Mobile City ecosystem is completely inked. After careful consideration, it is not very reasonable. I always feel that this set of things would be more suitable if it were a mini series of HBO or Netflix. Just making a film, there is no way to tell a complex background and story - after all, this requires a long foreshadowing, and the foreshadowing in the early stage will cause the first film to lack a climax. Once the film hits the streets, it will not be released. If there is one, then all the foreshadowing and the explanation of the setting are meaningless.
Hollywood fantasy films have always faced huge constraints in this regard. Therefore, it is difficult to go beyond the "visual spectacle + cliché plot". With the advent of the Internet era, new forms of film and television works are gradually being derived, which may bring a better way of presenting fantasy works to film and television.
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