Foster on Film

In the near future, a plague has stripped humans of a majority of their memories, and it continues to destroy any new ones in a matter of minutes or hours (it isn’t clear which or if it varies with the individual). For nine years, a young woman and her artistically inclined father have survived in a sealed bunker. Outside in the ruins of civilization, two people who assume they are a couple because they woke up together, a violent man, a child, and a scientist all mill about on their separate and seldom intersecting paths.

Embers starts with a hearty science fiction premise: What if no one could remember anything. But from there it goes nowhere. Only the scientist has seen Memento, so knows to write down his past. Thus he alone can set goals, but as his memory departs so quickly, he can never carry them out. For the rest, they move around (or in the case of the two in the bunker, they don’t move around). They stumble here and there, unhappy if they are alone and reasonably happy if they are not. There’s no more plot than that, no direction, and no ending. We watch things happen for a time, and then it stops.

With no story to tell, random events, and not a whole lot of character, there was little to keep me engaged. All that’s left is theme, which means Embers has to be a pretty clever movie. Unfortunately it’s not.

Trauma vanishes with memory. Is this a statement on the human condition, or just how the virus works? Likewise people tend to keep their personalities, as best as I could tell, without their memories. Again, is this a philosophical comment, or just a world building exercise? It doesn’t really matter as Embers has no new insights to bring to bear. I’m assuming that most viewers will already have speculated on how much of identity is memory. If you haven’t, this isn’t the film for you. If you have, this film has nothing to offer you.

Since merely asking the question, “Are we more than our memories?” is the only reason this film exists, it should have gone in a more metaphysical direction, with the memory loss due to the actions of higher beings. Because it went the sci-fi route, it needed to play fair, and it doesn’t. Our characters (one can’t call them protagonists) lack primal survival skills. So without memories, how are they still alive? Just by finding can goods? After nine years? How is there a child walking around when his parents would have forgotten he existed shortly after setting him down as a baby? And where are the bodies, since we do have a massively reduced population. Sure, there could be solutions to these problems, but they are all unlikely (a hidden master class of unaffected elites that sneak canned food out into the ruins and pick up the dead, perhaps) and so really need to be touched on. Since they aren’t, I was left thinking for the last hour of the film, “That guy should be dead.”

If it was cut in half, Embers could play at the beginning of a Freshmen philosophy class, before the interesting discussion started. But as is, though reasonably well made, it is not entertaining, interesting, nor enlightening.