City of Ember Synopsis
Due to an unexplained catastrophe on Earth, a group of scientist design a community of survivors to live underground, making it so that the people of the city (named Ember...thus the obvious title) may survive for two hundred years, to outlive the disaster that occurred on the surface.
As the city goes through many mayors through the years (each tasked with keeping a time-release briefcase in trust for the next mayor on, etc...), the people of Ember start to forget wehy they live in the darkness that is the giant underground area that houses their city.
Jump to present: the current Mayor, Cole (Bill Murray, in an uninspired role), is a corrupt opportunist, and lives for abuse of his mayoral privileges, and hoards whatever resources he can get his hands on, aware that supplies would eventually run out. As the power generator powering the city begins to fail more and more often, the city dwellers ask themselves whether they can survive much longer.
Young new school graduates Lina (Saoirse Ronan) and Doon are assigned jobs within the city, as is the rite of passage for all who graduate and head off to adulthood. Unlike many before them, both Doon and Lina are very curious as to what lies outside of the city walls, and the power outages is but another motivational tool to find out. Lina discovers her relatives have the box which happens to appear in most mayor portraits -- the time-released briefcase. As she finds clues within which could signifiy directions out to the surface, Lina asks for Doon's help in putting the elements together, while dodging Mayor Cole and his equally corrupt henchmen.
The race for a way to save the inhabitants of Ember from perdition -- as well as finding a way out, makes the bulk of this, a somewhat slow, uneven pseudo family drama.
City of Ember Overall Analysis
Some books are very popular in the printed form, but may not translate well to screen. Whether this film lacks a sense of connectivity to its follow-up tales (i.e. the other books from the Ember series), or simply suffers from a lack of a good editor, is up for debate.
Though the elements and clues to the solution in saving the city and finding a way out of their secluded underground community are rationed evenly through the film's 95 minute running time, many segments feel disconnected from each other.
Despite having found the "sacred" time released briefcase of the builders of Ember, why is it that this given generation of teens suddenly get motivated to find a way out and above? After 200 years, surely someone must have worked on looking for a suitable means to explore outside what was clearly designed by modern day scientists (prior to the so-called unnamed disaster).
In fact, there never seems to be much of a drive by the populace to question what is out there, possibly due to a sense of abandon, driven out of each inhabitant's will, over generations of tedium.
Be that as it may, the movie doesn't benefit much from its cast. Though she is an up and coming actress, young Saoirse Ronan (Atonement, Death Defying Acts) has very little else to do, other than following Harry Treadaway's lead in most scenes. The clues and their solutions, throughout each scene, arrive oh so conveniently (very much like how Nicolas Cage finds each obscure link to his mysteries in the National Treasure film series), leaving very little to the imagination.
Bill Murray, usually fun in comedic roles or at least decent in recent dramas, is completely wasted here, as is Tim Robbins (as Doon's father, who also tried to find a way out of Ember, years before).
Although there is no major villain to this piece (Bill Murray doesn't even qualify), the sense of impending doom fails to register with the viewer, and so one is left to wonder what the sequel would be like (assuming there is one -- there are four books in the Ember series), and whether it would entice the audience more than it has here, in this weak book-to-film translation.
City of Ember DVD Features
Good luck finding extras on this disc, as the only notable link to extras, leads to movie previews of other upcoming Fox titles.
3 out of 10, for leading the audience to yet another dark hole -- that of wasting 95 minutes adapting this movie.
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