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Peter Jackson’s 2018 Mortal Engines embodies one of the central contradictions of steampunk and related genres of retrofuturism. As with Philip Reeve’s novel of the same name, it offers audiences a spectacular, post-apocalyptic vision of the future that is ultimately constructed in the image of a past that never happened. In doing so, Jackson deploys the neo-Victorian in much the same way that proponents of the Gothic Revival deployed the medieval in the mid-nineteenth century—as a kind of a missed historical opportunity that, when projected into the future, allows the present to imagine a way around and forward from the current impasse. By examining Jackson’s film and Reeve’s novel in this light, this chapter seeks to better understand the problematics of how steampunk, neo-Victorianism, and other forms of retrofuturism harness the aesthetic and political potentials of the Gothic Revival while ostensibly distancing themselves from the legacy of nationalism, racism, and cultural imperialism that was part and parcel of the movement.