REVIEW : City of Ember
Posted on Friday, October 10, 2008
A post-apocalyptic children’s fable that recalls the pre-Amelie work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Pixar’s Wall-E, City of Ember is a production designer’s movie that retains some of the fairy-tale darkness of the Grimm Brothers. It might strike some as too angst-producing for children, because although it contains only a couple of scenes of imminent threat, it raises the specter of environmental exhaustion and the inevitable end of a way of life.
Directed by Gil Kenan (Monster House ), City of Ember might cause a thinking person to wonder for whom exactly it was made. Probably the so-called “’tweenagers” (and tweenagers at heart ) who snatch up all those Narnia and Harry Potter products (City of Ember is based on a young adult novel by Jeanne Du-Prau ), in that it’s intended to create another franchise. There’s a distinct “part one” feel about the film, as it consists mainly of exposition and a chase — in structure it recalls the recent Journey to the Center of the Earth, also an attempt to establish a renewable series.
But if the narrative seems slight, the movie looks good and doesn’t overstay its welcome. It winks at adults by sprinkling its cast with A-list actors who aren’t given much to do: Bill Murray plays a gluttonous mayor with the faintest trace of the smarm he used to invest in his Saturday Night Live lounge singer, Tim Robbins cranks up his earnest gravitas, Martin Landau delivers a punch line, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies ) has a couple of lines as a kindly greengrocer.
But the movie rests squarely on the backs of two young actors, Saoirse Ronan (Atonement ) and Harry Treadway, who has been in a horror movie and the excellent Control.
Ember is a vaguely fascist subterranean city that was constructed as an escape plan for a human race that had depleted the earth’s resources. The original plan was for people to go underground and emerge after 200 years to start over. But over the course of generations, the time capsule that contained instructions for returning to the surface was lost. So was any institutional memory of a world beyond the city.
Now, decades after the original date for evacuation, Ember’s infrastructure is in grave disrepair. Doon (Treadway ) wants a crack at fixing the city’s sputtering generator, but career opportunities in Ember are decided by lot. So he’s heartbroken when he’s picked to be a messenger, and is eager to trade work assignments with Lina (Ronan ), who has been assigned to the pipeworks.
Lina has an interesting family history — one of her ancestors had been the city’s mayor and her father drowned under mysterious circumstances. She discovers a curious metal box that contains cryptic instructions. Soon she and Doon are working together to puzzle out the contents of the box, and discovering some inconvenient truths about Ember’s allegedly bare storerooms.
There are some holes in the narrative and some loose ends that aren’t entirely tied up, but maybe the filmmakers are saving those for the hoped-for sequels. City of Ember 80 Cast: Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, Martin Landau, Saoirse Ronan, Harry Treadway, Marianne Jean-Baptiste Director: Gil Kenan Rating: PG for mild peril and some thematic elements Running time: 95 minutes
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