REVIEW: Creativity, wonder shine in ‘Ember'

Director Gil Kenan, 31, whose only other film, "Monster House," was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Film, now gives us a shadowy, sci-fi version of "The Goonies" in keeping with the more sinister-feeling world in which we now live.

"City of Ember" is an obsessively creative and wondrous film, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hollywood need not dumb down its fare to appeal to kids of all ages.

The subterranean city of Ember was built as a refuge for humanity after the surface of the planet became uninhabitable. A massive generator powers the thousands of lights that keep the cavernous darkness at bay. But after 200 years, the generator is beginning to break down, and no one remembers how to repair it. As the blackouts grow more frequent, teenage classmates Doon (Harry Treadaway) and Lina ("Atonement's" Saoirse Ronan) find themselves joining a work force that can do little more than throw ineffectual patches on Ember's accelerating decay.

When Lina stumbles on an old metal box in her senile grandmother's closet, she discovers a cryptic and nearly indecipherable document inside. Enlisting Doon's help, the two friends conclude that Ember was never meant as a permanent home and that an exit lies somewhere beyond the great darkness that surrounds their city. But Ember's self-serving mayor (Bill Murray) will do anything to quash the information Doon and Lina have brought to light. His administration prefers to fiddle while Rome burns. Ember's only hope of survival lies in the hands of two kids who must now race against the clock in a quest to follow clues that will lead them all out of the darkness.

"City of Ember" is based on the best-selling novel by Jeanne Duprau, with a script by Caroline Thompson ("Edward Scissorhands"). Walden Media, the production company behind such hits as "The Chronicles of Narnia," "Bridge to Terabithia" and "Holes," has made a formidable reputation as a producer of fantasy-based, family-friendly movies drenched with imagination and old-fashioned adventure. "City of Ember" continues that winning streak.

With a story evocative of this summer's "WALL•E," "City of Ember" is a movie about coming out of instead of heading into an apocalypse. Ember is a dystopia with inhabitants who don't know that anything better exists. Their ancestors' history has been long since forgotten. In order to maintain their increasingly embattled lives, the municipal government demands oaths of loyalty, distributes jobs via a lottery (everyone works to keep the city running), discourages its citizens from thinking of anything outside of their narrow employ, and insists that one should never question one's fate.

But children have a way of sidestepping indoctrination and embracing the idea that the future is what each individual makes of it. Doon is constantly asking questions about the world around him. "How should I know?" he is told repeatedly. "It's not my job." But Doon doesn't see the world through such claustrophobic constraints.

He is an individual in a sea of mollified sheep, and once he seizes upon the truth, nothing will stop him from following it to the end. And the children, so the saying goes, shall lead them. A week after watching the middling "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" and despairing for the future of children's films, "City of Ember" arrives to show us all that it is possible to craft family-friendly movies with both edge-of-your-seat excitement and genuine intellectual curiosity.

Despite the fact that the film is obviously geared to a younger demographic, it is replete with homages to other great science fiction classics, including the silent masterpiece "Metropolis," Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and George Lucas' pre-"Star Wars" outing, "THX-1138."

Late in their respective post-productions, the studios behind the sci-fi classics "Blade Runner" and "Brazil" wrested control of the films from their directors, and fearing audience backlash to their murky tones, tacked on jarring, inharmonious happy endings overflowing with light and promise. It's a pretty insignificant spoiler to say that "City of Ember" ends in much the same way. But here, the ending is appropriate.


details
CITY OF EMBER

Cast: Bill Murray, Tim Robbins
Director: Gil Kenan
Playing at: Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark, Hollywood, Tinseltown
Rated: PG (for mild peril and some thematic elements)
Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes 

GRADE: A-