It's a shame there are no extra features on the DVD for City of Ember because there's probably at least an hour's worth of information about how the film's set designers created the grungy, falling-apart underground habitat of the title.

Ember is the city (more of a village, really) in which the remnants of humanity are huddled after some vaguely defined catastrophe forced them off the surface of the Earth. It combines the quaintest and grubbiest features of Dickens's London, The Matrix's Zion and the Shire from The Lord of the Rings.

It's a cute place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there, in part because most of its infrastructure seems held together with hempen rope and binder twine. The citizens don't even seem to have advanced as far as duct-tape technology.

The film, based on the first in a series of young adult novels by Jeanne DuPrau, follows the efforts of two teenagers named Lina (Saoirse Ronan, Atonement) and Doon (Harry Treadaway) as they try to figure out and then figure a way out of the community, which no one has left since it was built/founded more than 200 years earlier.

As the prologue explains, Ember was built to last 200 years. A locked box containing an exit strategy and designed to spring open at that point was entrusted to Ember's first ruler, but it was misplaced many mayors ago, and the incumbent (Bill Murray putting on his best "what, me worry?" face) has no idea it exists. The kids' quest is helped by the fact that they have found the box, hindered when Lina's baby sister uses the enclosed note as a teether.

City of Ember follows a long and fruitful science fiction tradition that imagines futuristic colonies of humans cut off from the rest of mankind and unaware of their fate. Think of Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson in The Island; the domed, doomed city of Logan's Run; the Canadian TV cult classic The Starlost; even the corpulent passengers of the cruise ship Axiom in the recent WALL-E.

But it also belongs to an even more rarified group of films; kids' movies with brains. Too often, talking animals, a space-themed setting or chimpanzees are considered adequate engagement for young filmgoers, a line of reasoning that reached its nadir last year with Space Chimps.

Once or twice a year, however, a really exemplary kids' film will reach the big screen. 2005's Zathura, based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg (Jumanji, The Polar Express), was one such beast, as was 2007's The Last Mimzy; it's a reworking of the E. T. story with enough newness to avoid being branded a rip-off. City of Ember is the latest to join the club.

It's instructive to note that City of Ember is a Walden Media production. The company, which specializes in family-friendly entertainment based on books, was behind the Narnia series of films as well as Bridge to Terabithia and the 2006 live-action remake of Charlotte's Web.

With its links to Christian conservative circles, Walden Media is often accused of subtly peddling religion in the guise of entertainment, but any proselytizing in this film is strictly anti-authoritarian. Murray's mayor figure, for instance, is shown to be corrupt, short-sighted and not to be trusted.

Lina's guardian blinds herself to Ember's predicament in favour of preparing for a meaningless annual holiday known as "The Great Day of Singing." When asked what can be done to save the city, her reply is at once glib and scriptural: "The Builders will come again and show us the way." Clearly, that's not going to happen. Adults who encourage free thinking, meanwhile, are seen as a threat to the establishment, but the film clearly wants us to root for them.

It's a borderline call whether City of Ember is interesting enough to fully engage adult viewers, but it certainly won't bore them, and it will reach the younger crowd. The only downside is that the film did a middling US$8-million at the North American box office, so a sequel is unlikely. But there's nothing to stop kids from picking up the books.

Source: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=1fb6ed67-20cb-4d6b-b81f-bced2735cb39