![]() ![]() Lina, who is the descendant of the seventh Mayor, finds the box of instructions in her grandmother's house and shows it to her friend Doon. On the Assignment Day, teenagers Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) and Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) are assigned to work with the pipework and as messenger, but they swap their job positions. The power generator has problems and the blackouts are longer and more frequent and the city is running out of food that needs to be rationed. However, the instructions are lost and the inhabitants stay in the city that is completely deteriorated. They leave instructions for the future generations to return to the surface of the planet in a steel box that should be kept by the Mayors through the generations. But blame the director for not quite knowing how to pull his different actors into the same movie.At the end of mankind on Earth, scientists build a self-sufficient underground city for a few people in order to preserve the human race for 200 years. In addition, those tentacled monsters aren't particularly imaginative there are too many chase scenes and there's entirely too much trite and cliché dialogue along the lines of "We're running out of time!" and "We have to do something!" and "Don't do anything foolish!" and "I'll bet there's something on the other side of that door!" and the repetitive "Something's not right!" Blame screenwriter Caroline Thompson for all that. Unlike Harry et al., Doon and Lina are boringly earnest, never witty. The three are motivated to try and repair the generator and find their way out of their enclosed world to the "unknown regions." The long-lost metal box holds maps essential to solving all these problems.īut in our Harry Potter-ized era of smart and feisty teenagers fighting evil, City of Ember seems lame indeed. Blackouts are becoming more and more frequent, food supplies are dwindling, and only a few smart and good people - like the single father Loris (Tim Robbins), his feisty teenage son Doon (Harry Treadaway), and Doon's brave friend Lina (Saoirse Ronan, so intriguing in Atonement and so bland here). But now the city's generator is failing and no one seems to be able to fix it. Based on a book by Jeanne Duprau, the film is set in a dank and deteriorating underground world, where Earth's survivors escaped for safety 200 years ago. All potentially hilarious.īut this is not a comedy at all. And goofy little robots that keep crashing into things, and, for some reason, beetles that are the size of race cars, and huge, lumbering creatures with oily red tentacles. Then there's Martin Landau, delightfully funny as a sleepy, crusty old mechanic, and Mary Kay Place (her talents wasted here) as a sort of perky, futuristic true believer. You're primed to giggle from the get-go, when a portentous voiceover intones, "On the day the world ended, the fate of mankind was carried in a small, metal box," and a group of somber elders stands around looking all pompous and ceremonial with said mysterious box. For example, the reaction to seeing Bill Murray, with his signature implacable, hangdog demeanor, stroll in as the mayor of the artificially illuminated and claustrophobic city of Ember, all pouchy-eyed and deadpan, with underlings scurrying behind holding a tiny canopy over his head, is to laugh out loud. Some of it has to do with director Gil Kenan's casting. Early scenes in City of Ember set up the expectation that this is a comical spoof of the sci-fi thriller genre. ![]()
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