The City of Ember/Headscratchers

I only saw The Film of the Book, but there was some Fridge Logic in there that I wonder if it was in the book. I understand the Builders not wanting people to go to the surface for 200 years, but why such a convoluted plan where so much could go wrong? I mean the whole thing with the boats and the secret rooms upon secret rooms and the wheels getting stuck and the dangerous rapids. Why not just hide a giant elevator that you need the cards to operate?

• You can only hope it's a bad, bad, bad movie based on a good book. I didn't reed the book, but if it has the same wallbanging plot holes, it's not worth being used as fuel. Bad escape route? Instead, ask yourself:
  • Where are the telephones gone? No more that ten years before the events, there should have been quite a number (the lead female protagonist keep an automatic secretary cassette with her father's voice). No longer then a decade, and they use runners as voice messangers?
    • This leads to Fridge Brilliance. Electrcity is scarce and valuable to produce light, so to conserve energy probabley only wealthy people can afford the energy for telephones. As for the scretary cassette, it was powered by Lina peddling, so they would not have to pay for the electricity.
    • The phones weren't in the book. They were in the movie for a plot point though, so they came, served their purpose and left.
  • A two century old wodden waterrail, in a cavern no less? And still so solid?
    • Again, this was added to the movie to add drama. I suppose they chose wood because it was lighter, so easier to move, than stone or metal.
  • Where is knowledge? They have computers (or likely, or what else opens the door when they use the plastic key, or keeps the year count in the case?), but every little bits of human knowledge is on partially rotten books. Way to go.
    • The Builders probably attributed the conflict that started the wars to people becoming lazy assholes because of technology. Also, they didn't want to have the citizens of Ember to have knowledge of the outside world, because that could cause them to try and leave and, y'know, die.
    • This was probably down to bad planning on the builders part, or the mayors of Ember delibratly erased the data on computers.
  • Weapons. Probably Ember was meant to be an utopic peaceful place, but horse sized bugs and mammuh moles would make guns a requisite to survival. And no one knows what lures outside. That brings to...
    • There were no bugs or moles to provide Nightmare Fuel in the book, in case you were wondering.
  • No one knows what is outside. The survivors are not prepared to face an open world. I won't bet a penny on they go over a single winter.
    • One of the books says that Ember was built in California, so winter shouldn't exactly be a big problem. However, in the fourth book they do experience a winter... so yeah (probably post-nuclear climate change or something).
  • Obviously, we are ignoring the fact they should have been dead for lack of sun light (that, if you wonder, is required for many biological processes).
    • Also, I'm no doctor but since they spent their whole life in a shady underground city, I'm pretty sure the powerful sun will have blinded them, at least temporary.
      • It sort of does, temporarily. In The People of Sparks (when the majority of Ember arrives on the surface) everyone is shocked and stunned by the sun, which I assume would amount to flash blindness.
  • In his review, Roger Ebert pointed out the fact that the whole city has been lighted for two centuries by unreachable light bulbs, the kind that barely last half a decade nowadays.
    • Lightbulbs can last for far longer than half a decade; take this nearly 100-year-old lightbulb that still works.
  • Again this is coming from a Troper who only saw The Film of the Book, but where in the hell did that giant mole come from?
    • This troper's guess is that they were somehow shrunk down to minuscule size so as to require fewer resources, which might make sense if civilization was collapsing from a shortage of resources. What just bugs me is this: at the end of the film, we see the protagonists, having made it to the surface, look straight down upon Ember through a very deep hole in the ground. Doesn't this suggest that Ember should have flooded every time it rained?
  • Another think to think about is how the three kids reached the surface and then walked off into the sunset. How on earth are they going to survive the surface alone for the time it takes for everyone else to come join them?
    • It's been a year or so since I read the sequel, but iirc they're up there for a while (.e. a day or so), and the lady who supported them has the note they dropped down, so after a while the rest of Ember comes up to the surface the same way Lina and Doon did, or something very similar; and then they run into a group of surface-dwelling people who grudgingly teach them how to live. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I really don't know what things they changed at the ending.
    • A troper who has recently reread the books is now chiming in. I don't know anything about giant moles, but the Emberites were placed belowground because the World War Three to end World Wars had broken out, and the likelihood of anyone surviving was slim. After the world had nearly been destroyed by technology, the Builders made an effort to keep the Emberites away from any knowledge, Adam and Eve style. They couldn't even make fire, because that would be dangerous.
    • And yeah, the escape plan could have used a bit more backup. I mean, sure, the magic box with clearly marked instructions was given to the Mayor, but humans are naturally corrupt, and they should have forseen something like the seventh Mayor stealing/losing the box.
    • The rest of the series is about the Emberites trying to adapt to an aboveground society. They migrate to the village of Sparks, where the people reject them, and we get to learn a whole Aesop about the nature of wars and humanity's instinctive hatred of all that is different. One of the things that causes friction between Sparks and Ember is that the Emberites are, for all intents and purposes, useless. Imagine you being transported back in time to a rustic, countryside setting. You might have all sorts of cool concepts ("Hey, guys, you can make electricity do all this stuff for you!") but you wouldn't actually know how to impliment them ("What do you mean, there are no batteries?"). Meanwhile, you'd need to be earning your keep doing hard labor you are unused to, in the blazing sun. That's how it went with the technologically advanced, but helpless, Emberites.
    • And then it all gets fixed, anyway, in the fourth book, where we discover the amazing properties of solar-powered diamonds. No, really.
      • Solar-powered diamonds FROM SPACE!
    • Umm, why didn't they bring any of the technology with them from Ember?
      • Things got bad real fast at the end, basically, and it's amazing anybody got out. (I believe it's made clear in the 4th book that some people didn't, in fact, get out in all the chaos.)
• It Just Bugs Me that so many Tropers who haven't read the book are posting under the book entry... but that's rampant, and not just in this entry.
• There's no romance between Doon and Lina, not even a little nod. It's a Missed Moment Of Romance.
  • I think this was intentional by the author so that focus could be put on the plot and not "Ohmygosh, does he love me?" (just look how messed up The Hunger Games' love triangle got.) I don't remember how old they were in the books, but Lina and Doon see each other as very close friends. Also, in the epilogue of the fourth book, when they're older and probably more open to romance, there's a line that says "a look went between them, like a current of electricity," and it's mentioned that they get a house together.
• The way they choose people's careers in Ember. Kids basically pull a piece of paper from a bag and hope they get something they have some skill in. The generator is failing, supplies are running out, and the best way they can think of to assign jobs is the luck of the draw. You would think it would make more sense to assign people with some actual skill with machines or mechanics to work on the generator, since its so key to their survival.
  • I second this.
  • Well, the current Mayor is not the sharpest tool in the shed. His goal seems to be to maintain morale and hope things fix themselves. He figures drawing jobs out of a hat is fair, since it's unbiased. The problem is, in a survivalist society you kinda have to be a little biased towards people with skill necessary to keep things going.
  • The kids do do swapsies - Lina and Doon trade their jobs as a runner and a pipeworker respectively, I think. I think a blind eye is deliberately turned to this because as long as the jobs are done, who cares who does them?
• In the second book, one of the attempted projects was making a creek so they could swim in it. But wait, how would the Emberites be able to swim?
• One last thing : at the end, they reach the surface... by cascading DOWN a river which is already located near the city, dozens if not hundreds meter underground. How do they ended up on the surface by going down ?
  • Stairs. Hundreds and hundreds of stairs that the builders purposely built far away from the city so that no one would find their way out of Ember until the time was right.
    • Also, a set of switchbacks was explicitly mentioned in the books.
• In the film, what were the builders thinking when they built the funhouse ride out? Were they giggling to themselves about how many of their older descendants would have heart attacks on their way out?