"Ballast" is the very life of life.

A friend came into the room while I was watching the film, saw a closeup of the head of a Gila monster and said, "That's beautiful." I asked if she liked lizards. "I hate lizards," she said, shuddering. She wasn't thinking about lizards. She was observing the iridescent scales of the creature's head. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We are the beholder.

CITY OF EMBER is about teaching children to think for themselves, to question authority, to pursue the truth even at great risk and as a child of parents that gave me a QUESTION AUTHORITY shirt as a kid – I found CITY OF EMBER to be a fantastic film.

And while I hate to make sweeping proclamations based on twenty-five minutes of unfinished footage, I'm beginning to sense that he's transformed Moore's "unfilmable" deconstruction of the twentieth-century superhero into indelible twenty-first century cinema.