.jeri.

Reading a book not long before watching a movie can set one up for major disappointment. I know this, yet I set myself up by doing exactly that because I quite liked the book. I thought it was a great young-adult spin on a Logan's Run/Planet of the Apes genre movie. In it, Saoirse Ronan stars as Lena, a girl who lives in the city of Ember. Ember is a bit like Dark City - no sun, all artificial lights, only it's a little less technologically advanced - no one knows how to make a mobile source of light (or capture fire); as such, no one can go into the darkness that surrounds the city. It's self-contained, and to its inhabitants, it is all there is. The people of the city also don't know must of their history, so they don't know that the city was made by builders for a specific purpose, and that the builders left special instructions that were supposed to be opened at a specific time. The instructions were supposed to be passed from mayor to mayor over the years, but got lost.

The city's power supply is failing, and everything's falling apart. Everyone is afraid of what will happen if the lights turn off permanently. Lena stumbles across a partial version of the builders' instructions, and she and her peer, Doon try to uncover what they mean - both hoping that this could be salvation for Ember.

I experienced this story as an audio book. As the narrator read, I was able to perfectly envision an image of Ember, Lena, Doon, and every place they went. That's unfortunate, because my vision of Ember was quite different than what it looked like in the movie. I really disliked the settings and costumes in this movie. I even hated the casting, especially Tim Robbins as Doon's father, which was a complete mistake, as was Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Clary. While we're at it, I'm not so sure Bill Murray was the right person for the role of the obese, corrupt mayor either, nor was Harry Treadaway as Doon (who looks a little too emo to fit in to his environment, so maybe it's more of a styling issue).

But beyond all this, the failure of the movie is that it completely misses the heart of the book. It's like the script was written as a series of snapshots of the book's most interesting parts, but so many of those interesting parts were too hard to film, so they were changed for the worse. It seemed like more effort was spent making Lena's grandma's kooky house and Doon's father's gadgets, which are quite secondary to the central plot. The movie was short, too, and unnecessarily so. There were plenty of places where scenes could have been extended to build character and theme, but character was unimportant, and themes were nonexistent.

I was so disappointed in this movie, but am so glad I caught the book. It explores a lot of ideas in a very simplistic way, and I'm all about it being a sort of introductory sci-fi story for the kids. I'd write more if I had more time, but that's basically it, and I've got to get back to work.