Movie Review - City Of Ember

Take the best ideas from Dark City, The Island, Logans Run & The Goonies and you think it'd make for a truely awesome movie. With the acting talents of Tim Robbins, Bill Murray & Martin Landau you do have 3 performances worth watching (especially Landau).

Set in some dystopian future after an unknown apocalyptic event the people who make decisions decide to create an underground city and leave it isolated for 200 years leaving them a box that would open after the 200 years expired with instructions for what to do next.
The box is passed down by the cities Mayors until 1 dies and the box is then forgotten from memory and lost in a cupboard. An unknown amount of years pass but the city called Ember by its inhabitants is decaying. It is running out of food and its power generators are gradually failing.

Enter our protagonists, 3 children. 2 of whom are allocated jobs that introduce them and us to various parts of Ember, we also get to see exactly how bad things are going. With power failing they are determined to find a way out of Ember, here is where the movie parallels Goonies but nowhere near as well.
Our kids find their way out far too easily and much too late into the movie, theres no feeling of peril during that task and their journey is over and done not long after getting started. The film itself is based on a book, I feel they used the city of Ember well but stayed there far too long. Not enough was made of their journey, I felt they escaped and there was never any doubt they would and they never felt in danger whilst doing it.

The movie does look wonderful, sets and costumes are great. Bill Murray as the overfed & self serving Mayor of Ember is good but underused. Tim Robbins as the inventor father is woefully underused, Martin Landau as the oldest worker in the power station is excellent but just as he is starting to make the most of his role it is already over. The fact that the 3 main performers are children is more than likely its sales angle (I felt they were aiming for the same audience who enjoyed Lemony Snicket as the 3 main kids were pretty much carbon copies of those roles).

The movie did feel short and I got the idea it has been very heavily cut to get a more family orientated certificate, its just that once out of Ember the escape to the surface is over and done and we never get to see if anyone else makes it out. The ending is just too open for my liking, it had a great start and middle but a very weak and under done ending.