Wednesday, August 1, 2012

"City of Ember" Critique

"City of Ember" Critique


(for those of you who know me, this may bear a few similarities to my rant about Fallout 3)

First, full disclosure: If there's a book, I haven't read it and apologize in advance to the author.  This is about the movie.



200+ years went by... and the city, apparently, stagnated...

Over 200 years and nobody built a new light-bulb?  No tunnels were dug?  No mining occurred?  Nothing?  Really??

As near as I can figure, the City of Ember was put together at the very last minute on a shoestring budget, and into it they crammed the least-motivated least intelligent dregs of society.  It wasn't mankind's hope for the future, I suspect it was more like "well, just in case all the other plans fail, maybe these people will survive or something."

A damn cruise ship is better equipped for survival then the City of Ember was!!  No machine-shops to make replacement parts? Really??  No light-source fabrication?  No circuit-board construction?  No computers?  You must be kidding.  And the food... apparently a couple green-houses and tons of canned goods.

They had answering machines--which required programmed microprocessors (which means a fictional setting of at least 1960AD or later).  Manufacturing microprocessors--even primitive ones--isn't hugely difficult if you have the right equipment.  A few computing devices would have aided them immensely, but no, none of that.

Things which might have aided the city: The ability to make pipes, perhaps?  A bare minimum of equipment for the mining, refining, smelting, and machining the rocks around the cave into usable things.  Supplies for doing chemistry things--the right metals and chemicals and you can make circuit boards, gears, valves, wiring, tons of things any post-industrial age society could find millions of uses for... but no.

In 200 years any industrious people would have secured, cleared and lit a large nearby cave (or three) and produced a bountiful garden which more than met all the food needs of the populace.  (Though, given the planning, I'd bet they didn't have any plant seeds which weren't brought in by accident.)  They had apparently one or two potato-growing greenhouses.  Good thing somebody thought to bring a raw potato with them, else the city's inhabitants would likely have starved to death 150 years earlier.

ONE generator.  A single hydroelectric generator--with no capacitive in-line power retention is supposed to run the city for 200 years.  Nobody thought it would be good to give the citizens the plans/parts to construct additional generators along the river which flows under/thru the city?

And worse yet--they decided to maintain the a few of the worst ills of society for some stupid reason in the ill-conceived shoe-string budget survival city: money (why?), and a large standing army of "security" thugs who apparently exist to break things and intimidate the populace.  And worse, inefficient bureaucratic nonsense.  It feels like perhaps the City of Ember served the same purpose as the "second space-ship" in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy--you know, the one that was full of middlemen and phone polishers.

Anyhow, those thugs should have been mining new tunnels, refining minerals, making new lights with which to grow out the humans' underground demesne, damming the river for the additional newly-constructed hydroelectric power plants, helping mulch waste biological material for the gardens... really, anything other than breaking things and intimidating the populace.



So yeah, I guess that's about it.  Lots of time and people, and nothing accomplished aside from squeezing out an bare existence--well at least they managed to make yarn in a variety of bright colors.

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