'City of Ember': Dark but Glowing

Grim Drama Tells of Humans' Failing World Underground

Things are going dark in the "City of Ember," and that's not a good thing.

The last outpost of humanity is way, way underground, surrounded by a blackness so deep that no one dares venture beyond the city lights, which are failing. The huge generator sputters. Lights flicker. Things are snuffling in the shadows.

Fans of the popular young-adult series of "Ember" books will be right at home and mostly delighted to find themselves in the world that director Gil Kenan has tunneled out for them, from the flood lamps high above the city to the clanking pipe works where all is steel and iron and dripping water. Ember was built to last only 200 years, after an unspecified but apocalyptic horror sent humans burrowing underground to live with the moles and rats. It's year 241.

The Mayor (Bill Murray, in a wonderful turn) is corrupt, potbellied and not very bright. He oversees a sort of collective society, apparently a few thousand strong. There is a community hall and community greenhouse and community singalongs and kids go to school until they are 12, after which they are given menial jobs for life.

It sounds Soviet. And the adults do look wet and gray and pale -- but English. They dress in layers of brown and gray and charcoal, and come home grubby and soot-stained and tired. Even their little wood rowhouses sag. There are no plants outside the greenhouses. The people sing hymns to the light and the generator. I didn't want to imagine the dental care.

Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway), the only son of an eccentric inventor (Tim Robbins), and Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan), a schoolmate, want to save the city. Doon is convinced he can fix the generator. But it's Lina who discovers a mysterious box left behind by the Builders, the almost mythical ancestors who exist now only in portraits. The box has a map and "Instructions for Egress," which are going to be necessary when it becomes clear the mayor doesn't want anyone to egress anywhere.

Kenan did a deft job with "Monster House," an animated film about a creepy suburban house next door, and in this project he imagines Ember as looking like the movie set of a shabby English town square. It's deliberately artificial. (Perhaps too much so. It kept reminding me somehow of Whoville, minus the pastels.) This is the gentle view of life underground for 200 years: People don't go blind in the dark (in the book, it was lights out from 9 at night till 6 in the morning) or look like vampires. They look like they've spent the winter in Glasgow.

But behind the city walls is the real guts -- and secrets -- of the city, the muck and dirt and grease and foul odors of dank places, and this is wisely where Kenan keeps most of the story.

He also hews to the rules of myth, as did the book's author, Jeanne DuPrau. Doon lives with his dad, and Lina has lost both parents, and will soon lose her grandmother. Fractured families, dead or absent parents -- this is the emotional space storytellers have set aside for ages (Bambi, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Harry Potter) in order to allow their fictional charges to run off into places that children should know better than to go. This is the land of childhood terrors, filled with subterranean fears and the yawning gulf of adulthood. It's the last stop for children -- the place where you can cry in the dark, but nobody is ever coming to turn on the light and pat your back and tell you everything is going to be all right in the morning. You have to make it that way yourself.

Doon and Lina will have to find that place, to save themselves and to save their city. There are adults they can trust and those they can't, and scary things in the dark that aren't just shadows. These kids are after something they can't even name: sunlight.

It's not an entirely convincing trip, but it is the sort of satisfying movie you wish they'd make more often.

City of Ember (95 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG for mild peril and some thematic elements.