‘ON the day the world ended,” goes the open ing line of “City of Ember,” the fate of man kind was carried in a small metal box.” I’m interested.
For a kiddie adventure, the movie, based on the Jeanne DuPrau book, has a pleasingly moody, eerie quality: It all takes place in a wonderfully designed post-apocalyptic wasteland. Then there’s that evocative title, casting a burnt aroma over everything.
We never find out why the world ended, but “City of Ember” begins where “Dr. Strangelove” left off: What if humanity was driven underground to start over? (Minus the army of fertile vixens Strangelove promised.)
Ember is a barely functioning place where everything is coated in layers of dirt and generators struggle to keep the lights on. A kindly inventor, Loris Harrow (Tim Robbins), and his teen son Doon (the pixie-ish Harry Treadway) are resourceful enough to keep their household operating on steam and rust, but the future looks bleak.
Doon has just hit the age when the all-powerful Mayor (an amusingly dissipated Bill Murray) hands out lifetime job assignments. He is tapped to be a messenger, which would be a waste of his mechanical skills, so he swaps jobs with his classmate Lina (Saoirse Ronan, the creepy girl from “Atonement”), who has been assigned pipe-repair duties.
In the bowels of the city, Doon’s boss is a classic bureaucrat (Martin Landau) whose mantra is, “It’s not my job.” As the two of them try to plug the leaks in a prehistoric section of pipe, Doon asks when the new pipes are arriving. This is like Cuba asking when it’s going to get some new cars.
Lina discovers the metal box referred to in the prologue, a device rigged to stay locked for 200 years that has just now popped open in the back of her grandma’s closet. If she can unlock the box’s full potential, she and Doon may be able to figure out what is really happening behind the scenes in Ember – and that this clanking, wheezy city isn’t all there is to the world.
As the kids piece together a plan of action that looks a lot like a video game, there isn’t much doubt or suspense about where the plot is going. The details are what make the movie. Murray, for instance, doesn’t ham it up or talk down to the audience (though Landau does), and Ronan has an otherworldly poise.
There are some minor pretensions to allegory, but what the film is really about is its look, which keeps you interested even when the irrepressible pluck of the kids becomes a bore.
Jules Verne couldn’t have imagined a more sinister and yet more enthralling junkyard than Ember, a place where gears groan and power lines sizzle and the only way to deliver a message is to tell it to a kid, then watch as she scampers across town to repeat it to somebody.
CITY OF EMBER
Ashy wonderland.
Running time: 95 minute. Rated PG (mild peril). At the Union Square, the 84th Street, the Kips Bay, others.