Treadaway and Ronan are really quite good, even with some flat dialogue early on. Instead they pick themselves up and get on with doing what must be done. Doon and Lina have lived hard lives, and they’re certainly capable of feeling the pain of their circumstances, but they don’t wallow in their misery or angst over the problems they face. Thompson has sidestepped a lot of the worst traps young characters fall prey to. Perhaps unintuitively, that point of view is also the film’s other real strength, outside of its stellar production design. It’s not a Disney film, but neither is it “Pan’s Labyrinth.” It’s trying to be a little of both and neither at the same time, and the tap dance that requires can be felt throughout. And what you get is a tone that’s very hard to pin down, as very serious things and high falutin’ ideas are dealt with, but very much from a kids’ point of view. By nature of the setup, and the fantastic job the art department has done creating it, “City of Ember” is much closer to the real world than your average Once Upon A Time fairytale if you squint real hard it’s not difficult to think this could all really happen. Which wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t trying to appeal to the whole family, adults included. And movies you can’t follow aren’t movies you usually want to see again, or suggest to others, unless you’re a hardcore David Lynch fan.īut to anyone who is following things just fine it can feel a little patronizing. They can be very sharp about this kind of thing, but they also have the attention spans of, well, kids. It’s always a gamble, especially when aiming for kids, how much they’re going to understand and how much they’ll get lost in. It’s hard to blame the filmmakers for that, though screenwriter Caroline Thompson (“The Nightmare Before Christmas”) has done better work. Several conversations serve mainly as repetitions of major plot developments, just served up as interpersonal exchange exposition and introspection become interchangeable. Like a ’60’s comic book, characters always say exactly what is on their minds, even in the midst of doing it, and what’s on their mind is always plot points. Most of the first half of “City of Ember” is spent spelling out the setup as clearly as possible to make sure none of the potential audience misses a beat. Like a lot of children’s literature, and most Hollywood films, none of this is left to subtext. Young Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) thinks he can fix it if he can just get in to see it, and switches places with messenger wannabe Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) on the day jobs assigned in order to get his chance. Electricity really is the life blood of modern civilization and the heart of Ember, its mighty generator, is failing. After going for two weeks without power after Hurricane Ike, I have a newfound appreciation for how scary it is to be without power for long periods when your whole infrastructure is built around it to be stumbling around in the dark calling out someone’s name just as the citizens of Ember are forced to. They’re worried about the future of course, like people always are, especially because of the increasing number of blackouts. Machinery is patched and patched and patched again. When the phones give out, a new service is created whose members are essentially human messenger pigeons. Despite the fact that the city is gradually running out of supplies and more and more of it is falling into disrepair, the citizens find ways to make do. He and production designer Martin Laing (“Terminator Salvation”) have turned novelist Jeanne DuPrau’s concept into a living, breathing world that sounds like it should be Charles Dickens’ London by way of the Soviet Union, but isn’t. What sounds like it could be the most depressing fairy tale since well, since any real fairy tale that hasn’t bowdlerized for consumption is actually quite charming in the hands of director Gil Kenan (“Monster House”). Instead the city’s expiration date comes and goes and life does what it always does when the apocalypse comes. The day the world ended, a sorrowful Tim Robbins tells us, a last bastion of humanity was buried deep in the ground to wait it out in a city built to last two hundred years when a box containing the exit instructions would open. The apocalypse certainly does seem close at hand some days, which gives this fairy tale a little topicalness to mix with its timelessness. It’s not the words that matter anyway so much as the sentiment behind them, that this all might have happened once and therefore might happen again, and in “City of Ember” it all begins The Day The World Ends. That’s usually how it starts the words may change but the song stays the same. Once Upon A Time there was a children’s story set in some strange far off place.
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