For a fantasy movie aimed towards younger viewers, City of Ember is pleasantly brisk and exposition-free in establishing this new underground world. Jumping into the plot immediately, the film introduces the titular city simultaneously with the looming threat that drives the story. Ember, an underground industrial city powered by a single all-powerful generator, is under the risk of eternal blackout, as the generator has been malfunctioning more and more frequently. Escape is impossible, because Ember is an island in a sea of dark caverns.
As we get introduced to the characters, which also propels the story forward at a quick pace, we gradually learn more about Ember. It’s a city evoking the working class feeling of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, fashioned to resemble cities in a German Expressionism silent film, and for reasons unexplained has goat-sized Mothras buzzing around the city—but you just go along with it. 200 years ago, the city’s builders erected Ember as a fallout shelter protecting its citizens from an unnamed disaster plaguing the surface world. Knowing the shelf life of the city, these builders left behind a survival guide in a time capsule. It is the mystery of piecing together this guide that serves as the main adventure; a race against time to find a way out before Ember self-destructs.
One thing about City of Ember that perturbed me is the apparent parallels between Ember’s dying generator and America’s failing economy. It’s unlikely that this was intentional, but then again, the broken-down heart-of-the-city is such a broad metaphor that it could be interpreted as a nation’s doomsday in many ways. It just so happens that the one most prevalent right now is the economic crisis, a likeness supported by Ember suffering from food shortage. Making the real life connection even more unsettling is Bill Murray’s turn as Ember’s selfish and dimwitted Mayor, inviting a George W. Bush comparison in more ways than one. The Mayor’s big rousing solution to Ember’s impending recession is to offer empty promises and save his own hind, a solution that sees no end in sight.
Why doesn’t this allegory sit well with me? Because if followed to its completion, it is suggesting that heroes should duck from problems. At one point, the city’s greenhouse caretaker tells our girl-hero Lina (Saoirse Ronan) that we should always face our problems and fix them instead of running away. A great advice, is it not? Except, the film seems to view such fighting spirit as stupidity. Lina and our boy-hero Doon (Harry Treadaway) ignore that advice completely and continue on their merry quest to find a way out of Ember. If the allegory is about global warming, that means the movie is telling kids that instead of being environmentally conscious, we should just totally bail like those blob-humans did in Wall•E. “Help nurse America’s economy back to its peak? Screw that, I’m moving to Amsterdam!” That kind of thing.
Why does it promote such a defeatist moral? My guess is that it’s entirely accidental, though either way, that’s how it comes across. My guess is that City of Ember contains veiled Christian ideologies the same way Walden Media’s previous film, The Chronicles of Narnia, did. It’s another allegory: the builders (God) created Ember (Earth) with a certain permanent blackout in the future (Armageddon), but leaves behind written clues (The Holy Bible) on how to find the way to the surface world above (Heaven). City of Ember is really a story about the Biblical rapture. There is no solution to Ember’s generator problem, because the only way to be saved is to embrace scripture, the rest of the population be damned. It’s Left Behind, the Scholastics version.
It’s possible that even director Gil Kenan didn’t see the film through those Jesus-coated lenses, since the narrative itself works charmingly in a young adult novella sort of way. Kenan shot Ember with the energy he displayed in Monster House, mixing pithy storytelling with eye-popping visuals. It’s a shame that the film offers a poorly thought out principle that sabotages the story’s potential. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather see heroes that endure and not spend an entire film scavenger hunting for the opportunity to be deserters. Nothing to do with patriotism, mind you, it just doesn’t seem like a commendable message to send across and it certainly makes for a dud of an ending. Good thing it remembered to bring the fun during the livelier moments.
"City of Ember" opens October 10, 2008 and is rated PG. Adventure, Children & Family, Sci-Fi. Directed by Gil Kenan. Written by Caroline Thompson, Jeanne Duprau (book). Starring Tim Robbins, Toby Jones, Bill Murray, Saoirse Ronan, Harry Treadaway, Martin Landau, Marianne Jean Baptiste.
