Movie Review: Appeal of 'City of Ember' is familywide

Walden Media continues its string of quality adaptations of books for children and young adults with "City of Ember," an adventure film-with-ideas about a pair of brave teenagers struggling to solve the mystery of their crumbling futuristic underground city.

Walden is probably best known for its C.S. Lewis adaptations, but "City of Ember" has less in common with "The Chronicles of Narnia" than with "Z.P.G." and "THX-1138" and other environmentally conscious science-fiction films that end with inspiring images of the Earth's giver of life, the sun.

Walden Media and Twentieth Century Fox

Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) sees the possibility of a world beyond her underground home in "City of Ember."

City of Ember

For generations, the people of the City of Ember have flourished in an amazing world of glittering lights. But Ember's once powerful generator is failing...

Rating: PG for mild peril and some thematic elements

Length: 95 minutes

Released: October 10, 2008 Nationwide

Cast: Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, Saoirse Ronan, Martin Landau, Mackenzie Crook

Director: Gil Kenan

Writer: Jeanne Duprau, Caroline Thompson

More info and showtimes »

A so-called "family film" that doesn't pander to young people or to the adults who expect such movies to be mindlessly wholesome, "Ember" takes place in a deep underground city plagued by frequent blackouts and threatened with eternal darkness thanks to its failing generators and patchwork electrical system. (The production design is part Charles Dickens, part Fritz Lang's "Metropolis.")

In a setup that somewhat parallels that aboard the spaceship in "Wall-E," the citizens of Ember -- including the indolent mayor (Bill Murray) -- no longer remember that their city was built more than two centuries earlier to be only a temporary refuge from the calamity that then plagued the surface world.

"Ours is the only light in a dark world," the populace recites during its "Oath of Loyalty." Ember's favorite "group song" includes this lyric: "This is all we know -- Ember is forever."

Two free-thinkers deduce the possibility of a world beyond Ember. Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) is a novice pipe-worker with access to the tunnels under the city; Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan, the troublemaking girl in "Atonement") is a young messenger whose job gives her an excuse to run all over town. (In a clever bit of staging, the fleet-footed Lina really does race from place to place throughout the movie; as a result, the film's energy is high whenever she's onscreen.)

Like the society it depicts, "City of Ember" is self-contained. Adapting the first in a series of books by Jeanne Duprau, director Gil Kenan (the CGI "Monster House") and screenwriter Caroline Thompson ("Corpse Bride") reject the pop-culture jokes and gross-out humor that too often are included in family films to make them seem "modern" or hip to older viewers. The unfortunate overlong finale, however, seems to be a concession to the bad idea that every new fantasy film has to include a computer- generated action scene that could inspire a videogame.

Otherwise, "Ember" is a welcome surprise. It's the type of project that might have attracted Walt Disney or George Pal when those men were making "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Swiss Family Robinson" and "The Time Machine."

-- John Beifuss: 529-2394

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