[Review] City of Ember
The first movie based on Jeanne DuPrau‘s novel, City of Ember, hit theatres yesterday. I first learned of this movie, and the book behind it, through the Steampunk Home blog, and as I’d just run out of reading materials, I decided to pick up the book and give it a try.
The book was an easy and a quick read, clearly aimed at a young adolescent audience, but was still one of the best books I’ve read recently. It was a very cleanly written, wonderfully told adventure with no small amount of relevance to current politics, though the political aspects were just a minor atmospheric part of the story, and not forced down your throat as can often be the case. It was just an elegant and fun little book.
The movie was just as fun. They made a few changes, which made it rather more visually appealing and did not detract from the actual story. Well, at least not too much. I’m always one to encourage accuracy to the book where accuracy is possible. The special effects and settings for the movie were done extremely well, and all those lamps and clocks and gears made my steampunk heart go clickety-clack.
It got sort of hit-and-miss reviews, going by Rotten Tomatoes, but most of the negative ones seemed surprised that a kid’s book got turned into a kid’s movie, or had clearly not read the book at all and were annoyed with the (literal) darkness of it…when the whole basis of the story is about the lights going out. In that, I think, City of Ember, the movie, has been cheated.
Links: City of Ember Official Movie Website and at IMDB
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