This Old Guy enjoys film and TV that runs the gamut from avant-garde and acclaimed (Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows”, Werner Herzog’s documentaries, HBO’s recent “Chernobyl” series) to the profoundly unserious (Syfy’s “Happy” series, ABC’s “The Good Place,” Cartoon Network’s “The Amazing World of Gumball”)

Watching bad films can be a source of great joy for me; not only do I get a boost to my self-confidence as a writer (“Wait, if studios financed this script, then there’s no way my stuff doesn’t get made!”) but also by sharpening my analytical skills, as I try to figure what, exactly, went wrong. Syd Field’s gift to all screenwriters is insanely useful in that regard; my enthusiasm for his thinking is tempered by an appreciation for films that follow none of his prescriptive advice and succeed anyway. And there are many!

Mortal Engines is not a successful movie, but layers of half-baked movie concepts smashed together into a confection that is less New Zealand’s Best and more Nailed It! Kiwi-style. There is a visually stunning and silly short featuring mobile, carnivorous cities (“municipial Darwinism”!) There is a shiny romance between two characters who start with nothing in common but their hearts of gold. There is a scheming scientist with a nefarious plot and a daughter innocent to his wicked ways. A character from a James Cameron film is air-dropped into the proceedings, roughly at the same time as a gender-fluid remix of a character from a George Lucas film.

I would suggest there’s about one-third of a very good film hidden inside Mortal Engines, a narrative centered around the complicated relationship between an unlikely father and an adopted child. It’s a pity you have to sit through the other two thirds of the film, which – even with the assistance of as much legal cannabis as I cared to ingest – was not a source of joy.