A Tale About a Mysterious Underground City That Could Have Been So Much Stronger

The setting is extraordinary. An underground city a flicker away from total darkness, kept alight through thousands of streetlamps and suspended lights powered by a hydroelectric generator. Director Gil Kenan’s vision could be described, to coin a term, as grimepunk – steampunk’s proletarian sibling. Post-apocalyptic, decrepit, stylish in its lack of style, a focus on utility rather than prettiness, a patchwork aesthetic of grimy, rusty machinery barely maintained by a peasantry who know what the machines are for but not how they work. The city that gives the film, and the book on which it’s based, its name is like a low-tech, rudimentary analogue to Alex Proyas’ “Dark City.” Kenan gives Ember a claustrophobic, stagnant atmosphere, which is appropriate given that, as the prologue tells us, the confines of the city are all that generations of people have known throughout 200 years of isolation from an undescribed global disaster.

Unanswered Questions

But the story is conventional. A pair of garden-variety child heroes – resourceful and brave and all that – discover that all isn’t right with the city of Ember. Naturally, they race against both time and an antagonistic city Mayor to solve a mystery that will allow all of Ember’s residents to escape their dying city. At its best, “City of Ember” is infused with a Myst-like vibe as the plucky heroes unravel puzzles built into the city by the Builders. Like the classic game’s notorious puzzles, the kids have to piece together solutions from fragmentary clues and, in so doing, therein lies the thrills.

Mostly, the film plods along with a workman-like quality that, apart from Kenan’s astonishing visuals, never takes the film into a transcendental realm of science-fiction. “City of Embers” fails to cash-in on its unique locale, a problem that may rest with author Jeanne Duprau. Setting aside niggling common-sense questions, such as why there are no candles in the city, the film leaves unexplored, other than through the barest glimpse, the culture and politics of an insular realm that could quite possibly house the last remnants of humanity. It’s a similar problem that afflicted the Lord of the Rings trilogy. With a rich and unique universe to play in, Tolkien settled for a routine war story. Similarly, “City of Ember” offers rote characters mechanistically going from story point to story point – missing out on mythical world-building. While enjoyable, with an eminently likeable cast that includes Bill Murray as the corrupt Mayor and Tim Robbins as an engineer from the Rube Goldberg school of invention, “City of Ember” even misses out on those little ironies that make up memorable characters and situations. (See a future blog post for a spoiler-filled discussion of a prime candidate for irony.) So in a year defined, as with any year, by mega-budget fantasy hype-monsters, humbler fare like “City of Ember” is welcome…but sometimes the underdog is the underdog for a reason.

Frédérik invites you to discuss this movie and more at his blog (frederik-sisa.blogspot.com).