“City Of Ember” at Rotten Tomatoes - it’s not getting a very high rating (48%), but it sounds like an interesting enough premise and a good cast. I loves me some post-apocalyptic fiction, so I plan to see the movie at some point - has anyone seen it? Liked it? Hated it? Boring? Other comments?
Not so much a hard SF post-apoc story but a children’s fantasy, and it’s fairly well done. It’s got a good cast (Bill Murray, Martin Landau, Tim Robbins) and the leads are strong (including Saoirse Roman, the girl from Atonement). It doesn’t necessarily hold up to a ton of scrutiny, but it helps immeasurably that the movie is short (95 minutes) and full of forward momentum, so there’s not a ton of exposition or dilly-dallying. Definitely better than the Narnia film from this year.
I absolutely loved the book, so I am filled with hope/dread about the movie.
It was absolutely THE underappreciated YA novel of 2003 - the appalling, shameful drek called Eragon came out that year to an aggravating amount of unearned fanfare, while Ember languished in obscurity. I’m still a bit mad about that.
The trailer didn’t look much like the story I recall, so I don’t have a lot of hope that the movie will be a decent adaptation.
I never read the book, but I liked the movie a lot. It has it’s faults (mostly in its deus ex machina moments), but the plot and the characters and the pace allowed me to lose myself in the movie enough to not notice/care. And the deus ex machina is forgivable if you look at the movie like a fairy tale, where things just happen to work out in exactly the right way. The narrator in the movie actually points out one of them. I won’t spoil it for anyone who’s not seen it, but the narrator basically says at the end that a certain thing could have happened this way or that way, but instead happened in exactly the way in which the characters needed it to happen. Pointing it out like that adds to the whole fairy tale feel, and helps reduce the “Oh come on!” reaction I usually give to moments like that.
I’ve never read the book, but given the brevity of the film, I’m inclined to believe that a lot has been pared down fairly dramatically. Don’t look for a whole lot of nuance, but they do paint a curious civilization in some effective strokes (without worrying about how they could’ve actually functioned like that for so long). And the kids are smart, brave and resourceful without being the extremes of Uber-perfect or Hyper-annonying.
I had been looking forward to it after seeing the trailers and reading some buzz on io9. I went with my brother and a friend, neither of whom had seen any trailers and so weren’t as excited as me. I enjoyed it a lot except for one or two silly bits (the father’s present). My brother described it as “not as bad as I thought it would be” which translated as “I enjoyed it except for the fact that there were no hot girls in it”. The story and characters are interesting, and it also has an (not noir) atmosphere. Makes me want to go out and read the novels.
The book is great, but then I read the sequel and didn’t care for it, so that sort of retroactively ruined the first book for me. I doubt I’ll go see it, but maybe Netflix.
I wasn’t aware that it was based upon a children’s story at first. So I had a lot of suspension of disbelief moments. For the most part I liked it. Good scenery, the characters were fairly tight, and the acting was ok. The only thing I really didn’t like was the complexity of the ‘escape’ plan.
Here’s a shocker the actor who played Doon (who was 12 in the book), is actually 24 years old! His co-star is ten years younger.
It sounds like I’ll like it just fine (I don’t have excruciatingly high standards for my pa fiction - I pretty much take it any way I can get it).
BUMP
I watched the movie last night and am mixed about it.
On one hand, the story (and backstory) was interesting. The acting ranged from passable to good and the scenery was well done.
Unfortunately, the pacing was the movie’s biggest problem. They purposefully tried to keep the pace going and doing so, I felt cheated by what may have been heavy-handed editing. As such, it was hard to care for the peripheral characters.
In an episode of the Simpsons, Lisa attended a jazz club and commented something to the fact of listening to the notes they didn’t play. A lot of the movie felt like that as we had to backfill story parts and just assume they were always there. As such, motivations sometimes seemed tacked on.
There’s also the “Plot Convenience Playhouse” problem where things just happened to have been provided to move to the next scene in a way that seemed overly contrived.
As for the ending:
The kids set the escape plan in motion. A series of tasks that allows the citizens of Ember to leave town and go back to the Earth’s surface after 200 years. Sure, let’s go with that. But due to the route one has to take to get out of the city, how would they have gotten back if needed? It was a bit too Goonies-esque too.
I can’t imagine this movie appealing to kids all that much and it’s too juvenile for adults. Maybe tweens would like it?
And, about that ending- how were they to survive? Tools, seeds, shelter, training on how to use those?