Movie Trailers

• Directors: Gil Kenan
• Producers: Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman
• Writers: Jeanne Duprau, Caroline Thompson
• Genres: Adventure, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
• Actors: Bill Murray, Saoirse Ronan, Harry Treadaway, Mackenzie Crook

The movie introduction explains that the City of Ember is a fully-contained city built underground to house a human community for 200 years as a shelter from an unspecified disaster. A box has been provided which automatically opens after 200 years, and contains a tool and instructions for returning to the surface. Mayors of Ember keep the box a secret and only disclose its existence to their successors in office. When a mayor suddenly dies while still in office, the box is put in a closet in Lina’s house and unnoticed by anyone when it automatically opens as designed.

Some decades later Ember’s food supplies are becoming depleted and blackouts are increasingly frequent and longer-lasting, as the hydroelectric generator that powers the city has deteriorated. Much of the knowledge and technology from the city’s near-mythic Builders and earlier generations has been lost.

Two young friends, Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) and Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) are graduating from school. Lina is assigned to work in the Pipeworks of the hydroelectric generator, but trades jobs with Doon, who does not like his assignment to work as messenger. Lina witnesses the city’s decay as she relays messages, and Doon learns that the Pipeworks are held together with increasing amounts of patchwork. Nobody knows in detail how any of the city’s systems work. After a major malfunction of the generator during the city’s annual celebration, Lina and Doon conclude that Ember is in danger of imminent collapse. With the city’s adult population either largely ignorant of their plight or cowed by the corrupt Mayor Cole (Bill Murray), Lina and Doon search for the clues left by the Builders showing the citizens of Ember how to save themselves.

…

Indeed, Lina has the box in her home and has begun to understand its importance. While the mayor eats food, he accuses her that he steals food from Ember. Lina jumps the table stealing the second card while the blackouts occur. The pair escapes and tries to find their way out of the city with the instructions left in the box by the Builders, and receive unexpected assistance from Doon’s elderly mentor Sul (Martin Landau). Meanwhile, Mayor Cole goes to his bunker and he died by a giant star-nosed mole. Arriving at the surface they are initially disappointed that it is dark there as well, as described in Ember’s folklore, but when the sun rises they discover that light has returned to the skies and the planet has recovered. They also see through a hole the lights of Ember deep below the surface and realize they had lived in an underground city. Lina and Doon drop a message tied to a rock through the hole down to Ember telling the other citizens how to leave the city, where it is found by Loris Harrow (Tim Robbins), Doon’s father and one of the few adults aware of the city’s serious situation.