Bill Murray Movie:

Editorial Review:
Light bulbs speckle the sky instead of stars in City of Ember, a fantasy in which a secret city has been built to preserve mankind from worldwide disaster. But over time, the purpose of the city is lost--and the city gradually decays. As power failures threaten to bring on the collapse of everything, young messenger Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan, Atonement) discovers damaged instructions for leaving the city. Her friend, pipeworker Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway, Brothers of the Head), helps her find the hidden mechanisms that will let everyone escape...but the city's corrupt Mayor (Bill Murray) is more interested in personal gain and tries to stop Lina. City of Ember begins marvelously; the story unfolds smoothly, the production design is rich and engaging, the young leads are charming (Ronan is particularly good), and Murray is as superb as ever. Unfortunately, the movie starts to stumble; some plot turns are baffling (there seems to be some connective tissue left on the cutting room floor) and what should be an action climax flounders with subpar special effects. But even when the movie loses its sure-footedness, there are delightful moments and visual wonders. The strong supporting cast includes Tim Robbins, Mary Kay Place (Sweet Home Alabama), Mackenzie Crook (The Office), Toby Jones (Infamous), and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets & Lies). --Bret Fetzer

City of Ember [Theatrical Release] Reviews:
A new animal farm->after the light go out
2008-11-14 - This is a kid's sci fi book about 200 years after the fall
of mankind on earth. The best laid plans are astray here
and the little children are leading them;
they want a real future after the lights go out.
With the plans lost it is every corrupt person for themselves?
Will they find their future?

It was entertaining
2008-10-26 - Definitely worth seeing it once if you're a fan of the book. No major changes were made, and it was nice and refreshing after 4 years of having not read the book.

Fair adventure
2008-10-16 - What's good: teen leading characters, Lena and Doon, and a city with people and architecture straight from Charles Dickens.

What's not: most of the rest.

Following some unspecified catastrophe, the city's founders created this underground sanctuary to preserve human life and knowledge - but seem to have skimped on the knowledge. Now, two centuries after the founding, the city is counting down towards its own collapse, as its life support technology crumbles and stores of food dwindle.

Some, like Lena's mother, just smile and go back to their singing. Others, like Doon's father, have already tried escape of their own, and failed. Yet others, like Bill Murray's venal mayor, hear the clock ticking as clearly as anyone, and take that as cue to grab what they can and crush the rest. (That will look drearily familiar to anyone watching today's bank implosions being escaped via nine-digit golden parachutes.)

I haven't read the books, so I can't comment on the adaptation. On the whole, it's a fair flick with teen heroics that the younger generation will enjoy. Just don't hope for anything more than commodity entertainment, though.

-- wiredweird, reviewing the release to theaters

CITY OF EMBER (Film version)
2008-10-11 - Having just taken 129 eighth-graders who read the book to see the premiere, everyone left the theater disappointed with what director Kil Kenan and screenwriter Caroline Thompson have given us with this translation from the page to the screen. Thompson, an accomplished screenwriter, deserves more of the blame in their (and my) opinion.

Books rarely translate better to film and this one suffers for many reasons. Jeanne DuPrau's book is an amazing trove of metaphors (candles, the library, the seed, the Pipeworks, and the city itself). When works of literature work on multiple levels, the filmmakers should at least offer us more than one. In fact, this book could be a metaphor for metaphors -- there are things below the surface that exist whether we acknowledge them or not; it is our job to find the tools to excavate the "deeper" level of what exists for others only on the surface.

Having sacrificed the novel's intellectual depth, the film version does a great disservice to the dedicated reader: we are given special effects that defy logic and re-focus the story unnaturally and unnecessarily; there are included scenes of hyped-up action they are neither satisfying nor helpful with advancing the plot; we lose some of the intricate details of character development; there's an unnecessary inclusion of giant scary creatures that offer distracting (and bizarre) thrills; and the mystery of what Ember is is destroyed in the first minute of narration.

The design of the film is great, but as in design, the beauty is found in the details. I believe that the greatest details of the book are missing, hidden away like the people of Ember. Let them come into the light!

Lights Out for the Underground City
2008-10-11 - "City of Ember" succeeds in that it creates a world of its own. It takes place in an underground city that was once functional but is now falling apart; it has an appropriately ramshackle look, the structures looking as hand-me-down as the clothes worn by the citizens. Unfortunately, creating a world is the only thing this movie succeeds at. The filmmakers seemed to think that the audience would assume everything about the story, which is a fancy way of saying that absolutely nothing was explained. How disappointing, especially since some notable names are attached to the project. The screenwriter is Caroline Thompson, who penned "Edward Scissorhands," "The Nightmare Before Christmas," and "The Addams Family" as well as a number of charming family films, including "Homeward Bound" and "Black Beauty." The director is Gil Kenan, who made his film debut with "Monster House," one of the best animated films of 2006.

"City of Ember" begins with a barely developed back-story. When humanity faced certain doom, a group of people called Builders constructed a vast city beneath the Earth's surface, a city they named Ember. Exactly what happened is never revealed, I'm sorry to say. All anyone knows is that the builders encase a special set of instructions in a metal time capsule, one that has a digital timer set for 200 years. It was then given to a woman assigned as Ember's mayor. She then passed it down to the next mayor, and it continued like this until someone decided to hide the capsule in the back of a closet. Why this happened is anyone's guess. Be that as it may, it's now 200 years later, and Ember is faced with a multitude of problems, the biggest being that the city's generator is dying. This is bad because a multitude of light bulbs is the only thing illuminating the city. The bulbs are located so high that I'm forced to wonder how anyone has the ability to change them. I'm also forced to wonder where the citizens got the bulbs in the first place; the city may have been well stocked to begin with, although it's hard to imagine 200 years worth of light bulbs stashed away somewhere.

For something that was built to save humanity, both the city and its population are surprisingly small. Maybe a lot of the people died through the years. Okay, but then how do they manage the dead? They can't bury them because there would be no room for other structures. They can't cremate them because there's nowhere for smoke to escape to. How did the Builders manage to work out sanitation issues? Where do the people go to the bathroom? How do they bathe? How is the sewage processed? We do see a network of pipes throughout the film, but it's still a mystery how the Builders got them there or even how water is pumped through. Exactly where did they find their water supply, anyway? And what about food? The implication is that the builders supplied them with enough canned food to last them 200 years. This is ridiculous; even when canned, it isn't possible for food to last that long. As far as I know (and this isn't just speculation on my part), the only food that doesn't spoil is honey.

In the midst of these logistical and practical nightmares is an actual story about two young people--a motherless boy named Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) and a parentless girl named Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan)--who discover things about the city no one ever knew. They're introduced during a pseudo-graduation ceremony, where the children of Ember are assigned permanent jobs. Out of a number of menial positions (with important ones like Police Officer or Janitor conveniently forgotten), Doon is assigned as a Messenger and Lina is assigned as a Pipe Worker. A Messenger is someone who runs back and forth across the city in a red cloak, delivering messages from one person to another. A Pipe Worker does maintenance work on the city's water pipes, which can't be replaced but can be patched up. Because Doon wants to be closer to the generators, he and Lena trade jobs. They then get involved in an escape plot, putting them at odds with the city's corrupt government, led by the gluttonous Mayor Cole (Bill Murray).

A number of side characters populate the film. Tim Robbins plays Doon's father, who always seems to know more than he lets on. Martin Landau plays Doon's supervisor, Sul, who knows only what his job requires him to know and nothing else. Toby Jones plays the Mayor's sniveling right hand man. Liz Smith plays Lina's grandmother, and like another Liz Smith character--Grandma Georgina from Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"--she's slow, forgetful, and somewhat senile. We even have gigantic mutant bees and moles lurking about, which may or may not hint at what happened on the surface 200 years earlier.

There are moments in this film that defy logic, such as the fact that Lina draws a picture of a city under a blue sky. The Builders make it clear that all future generations would not know about what happened on the surface, so that makes me wonder how she knows that there even is a sky above Ember. And then there's the ending, which is so elaborate that it's impossible to believe that the Builders had a hand in it. I won't describe it in detail; I will say that, if it were a log-flume attraction, it would be one of the most exciting a theme park has ever built. "City of Ember" is a valiant effort, but it overlooks far too many details. It doesn't tell us how or when, and it barely gets around to why. It's a great-looking but poorly developed story, and it's filled with characters we don't know much about. Clearly, someone's bulb went dim somewhere along the way.