Some really good actors play here, as other than Bill Murray we have Tim Robbins, Martin Landau and Toby Jones. This is not a bad film and I watched it with pleasure. Lina, being a descendant of one of early Mayors of City of Ember, comes from what is the higher strates in this underground society, when Doon on another hand is clearly working class - but they are nevertheless good friends and quickly become "partners in crime", when they start investigating some clues from the distant past, which the Mayor wants to remain hidden. There are however two teenagers, Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) and especially Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan), who want to do something for their dying city, even if they don't know yet what. The Mayor (Bill Murray), a guy both clueless AND ruthless (the worst possible combination) is unable to cope with this crisis - but is quite competent at preventing anyone of doing anything.
As generator begins to fail blackouts are occurring - and the reserves of canned goods and light bulbs are becoming depleted. But the city is now 241 years old - and it is slowly decaying. The city is built into a vast underground cavern and is filled with conventionally sized buildings and houses - the lights of this place are powered by a massive generator. With an unspecified catastrophe destroying human civilisation, a huge underground shelter was build to harbor a group of survivors - the "City of Ember". Below, more of my impressions, with some limited SPOILERS. It is a honest, solid science fiction/adventure film, targeting mostly young public, but also watchable for adults. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. The People of Sparks and The Diamond of Darkhold follow Lina, Doon, and the evacuated Ember residents for their first year above ground, while The Prophet of Yonwood is a prequel that takes place about 300 years before the events of Ember.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice.
Ember is the first in a series of four novels that take place in the same fictional world. Lewis, and the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordian also take place underground. Parts of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. A variety of works can be argued to fall into this subcategory, from Dante’s Inferno (in which hell is a subterranean cavern) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Alice falls through a rabbit hole into an underground dreamland), to science fiction that looks more like Ember such as Metro 2033 and its sequels by Dmitry Glukhovsky, which follow people living in the Moscow subway system to escape nuclear disaster. The genre has its roots in the disproved 17th-century Hollow Earth theory, which proposed that the Earth is actually hollow.
The City of Ember falls into a subcategory of science fiction and adventure fiction known as subterranean fiction, or fictional works that focus on life underground.