The city did not have any kind of air filtration system (as far as we know), only a ventilation system. Then again, we don't know where precisely the city is located at - it could conceivably be in one of the few locations that aren't susceptible to such activity. The city's residents would be safe underground, which may rule out earthquakes or any sort of heavy tectonic activity.This rules out any kind of heavy radiation, which would take several centuries to decay. The world was expected to recover within 200 years.The Builders had several years' notice, which they used to plan & build the underground city. The original book only refers to "impending disaster", but we can make some educated guesses based on the evidence: Neither the book nor the movie specify what disaster befell the world. Something we’re sadly denied.As revealed in the second book, there were a series of plagues & wars that ravaged mankind. Kenan’s palpable affection for his central creation is so strong that once we’re gasping fresh air, we want to dive back in, get to know Ember’s intriguing denizens better and properly explore its claustrophobic hinterland. You hope for an underground odyssey all you get is Ember… and out! The bad guys, headed up by Bill Murray’s disingenuous, pot-bellied mayor, never deliver up the threat. Mysteries remain unsolved (what’s with the outsize creepy-crawlies?) exciting action sequences are seemingly promised (a conflict with baddies on an impossibly high ladder!?) but fail to materialise. Here, though, Kenan reveals where there’s room for improvement: story-wise, the film only feels about two-thirds there. The moral isn’t hard to spot, especially when its adult population are portrayed as apathetic, corrupt, disillusioned or blindly grasping to ill-founded faith it’s up to inspired young heroes Lina and Doon to solve the puzzle left by Ember’s mythical Builders and escape their crumbling home. We’re introduced to this subterranean mini-metropolis’ decrepit charms via an astonishing aerial shot which wheels down from hundreds of dangling, flickering lamps to reveal humanity’s last hope, whose doom is contained within its very own DNA (or rather, town planning).Ĭity Of Ember is full of such sprightly visual thrills, and is packed with delightful incidental details that reveal a society making-do with dwindling resources. Ember is a decaying, dank urban jumble of crumbling redbricks, rusting lampposts and bleeding pipes, the kind of fantasy-sci-fi-retro world realised by Terry Gilliam in Brazil or Jeunet and Caro in The City Of Lost Children. Kenan has talked about his titular conurbation as the main character, and it’s clearly the one he loves most. On one level - and it’s a very important one - City Of Ember, based on Jeanne Duprau’s novel, is a triumph. So now we come to his second film: gone is the mo-cap, but the ’80s kids’ adventure vibe remains. With its ’80s kids’ adventure vibe and whirling, mo-cap style, Kenan marked himself out as a tyro who could tune in to a smart script and turn it in to an fairground-style entertainment, chills, spills and all. Gil Kenan’s Monster House was a beacon, flashing out across a darkness in which lurked faceless, franchise-spawned blockbusters, its sadly underappreciated luminance announcing: here is a new talent.
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