
City of ember rated full#
Ember is still full of life and light, even as it is beginning to fade and die out. I feel like if this film had been made today, it would have had the life color-graded out of it.

Everything has a patched, faded, reused look to it, but unlike the severely color-graded, washed out films we often see today, every object’s true colors are allowed to shine through the electric lights fill the city with a warm yellow glow during the day, Lina’s red cape is worn and faded but still beautiful, the dirty orange jumpsuits of the Pipeworks laborers stands out in their gray surroundings. The school and the houses and various shops and buildings really feel as if they’ve been used and inhabited for two hundred years. The storerooms are running out of canned food and clothing and light bulbs.Īs I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the film does a stunning job at bringing the crumbling city of Ember to life.
City of ember rated how to#
The ancient generator is dying, and nobody knows how to fix it. Confined in their city without movable lights, the citizens of Ember have been content to live as they’ve always lived for the past two hundred years. Beyond the reaches of the city’s electric lamps, the darkness goes on forever in all directions or at least, no one’s ever found an end to it. And I have some Thoughts.Ĭity of Ember takes place in the titular city, a dying beacon of hope that is the ‘only light in a dark world’. But anyway, I love The City of Ember and (two) of its sequels, and I love the film, so I decided to revisit them. Though Lina and Doon, the protagonists of The City of Ember, have been aged up a bit in the film, it works decently well, and there’s not even a hint of dumb forced romance, thank goodness. Honestly, I think I relate more to these precocious kids than to any dour and moody teenage anti-hero of today’s YA stories. In an endeavor to return to those stories and rediscover what I loved about them, I’ve been working my way through some of the stacks of novels with twelve-year-old protagonists that I used to devour as a child.

It seems that somewhere along the way, I have forgotten about the true joys of reading and watching films-of experiencing stories-and also forgotten all the wonderful stories I used to love.
City of ember rated movie#
Just what is this movie even about, and why have I broken my months’ long unofficial hiatus to talk about it? In a time when films are filled with buckets of CGI, the amount of loving care and attention to detail in this 2008 movie is wonderfully refreshing.īut I’m getting ahead of myself.


While the movie does not mirror the story of the book exactly, there are wonderful little shots and moments here and there that seem to have leapt directly from the pages of The City of Ember and into real life. The design of the sets, costumes, and props are a joy to look at, and do most of the leg work when it comes to the world-building in this film-no lengthy expository dialogue required. But, to me anyway, City of Ember is one of those movies.īased on the young adult novel of (almost) the same name, City of Ember is a masterclass in making a world come to life on film. It is a rare thing for a movie based on a book to be ‘acceptable’, much less ‘good’.
