Thirty-one-year-old director Gil Kenan, who’s only other film, Monster House, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Film, now gives us a shadowy, sci-fi version of Goonies in keeping with the more sinister feeling world in which we now live. City of Ember is an obsessively creative and wondrous film, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hollywood need not dumb down its fare to appeal to kids of all ages.

The subterranean city of Ember was built as a refuge for humanity after the surface of the planet became uninhabitable. A massive generator powers the thousands of lights that keep the cavernous darkness at bay. But after 200 years, the generator is beginning to break down and no one remains who remembers how to repair it. As the blackouts grow more and more frequent, teenaged classmates Doon (Harry Treadaway) and Lina (Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan) find themselves joining a workforce that can do little more than throw ineffectual patches on Ember’s accelerating decay.

When Lina stumbles on an old metal box in her senile grandmother’s closet, she discovers a cryptic and nearly indecipherable document inside. Enlisting Doon’s help, the two friends come to the conclusion that Ember was never meant as a permanent home and that an exit lies somewhere beyond the great darkness that surrounds their city on all sides. But Ember’s self-serving mayor (Bill Murray) will do anything to quash the information Doon and Lina have brought to light. His administration prefers to fiddle while Rome burns. Ember’s only hope of survival lies in the hands of two kids who must now race against the clock in a quest to follow the clues that will lead them all out of the darkness.

City of Ember is based on the best-selling novel by Jeanne Duprau, with a script by Edward Scissorhands‘ Caroline Thompson. Walden Media, the production company behind such hits as The Chronicles of Narnia, Bridge to Terabithia and Holes, has made a formidable reputation for itself as a producer of fantasy-based, family-friendly movies drenched with imagination and old-fashioned adventure. City of Ember continues that winning streak.

With a story evocative of this summer’s Wall*E, City of Ember is a movie about coming out of instead of heading into an apocalypse. Ember is a dystopia whose inhabitants don’t know anything better even exists. Their ancestors’ history has long since been forgotten. In order to maintain their increasingly embattled lives, the municipal government demands oaths of loyalty, distributes jobs via a lottery (there are no jobs of leisure — everyone works to keep the city running), discourages its citizens from thinking of anything outside of their narrow employ, and insists that one should never question one’s fate.

But children have a way of sidestepping indoctrination and embracing the idea that the future is what each individual makes of it. Doon is constantly asking questions about the world around him. “How should I know?” he is told repeatedly. “It’s not my job.” But Doon doesn’t see the world through such claustrophobic constraints. He is an individual in a sea of mollified sheep and once he seizes upon the truth, nothing will stop him from following it to the very end. And the children, so the saying goes, shall lead them. A week after watching the middling Beverly Hills Chihuahua and despairing for the future of children’s films, City of Ember arrives to show us all that it is possible to craft family-friendly movies with both edge-of-your-seat excitement and genuine intellectual curiosity.

Despite the fact that the film is obviously geared to a younger demographic, it is replete with homages to other great science fiction classics, from the silent masterpiece Metropolis to Terry Gilliam’s twisted but delectable Brazil, the cult classic Logan’s Run to Matrix: Revolutions and George Lucas’ pre-Star Wars outing, THX-1138.

Late in their respective post-productions, the studios behind the sci-fi classics Blade Runner and Brazil wrested control of the films from their individual directors, and fearing audience backlash to their overwhelmingly murky tones, tacked on jarring, inharmonious happy endings overflowing with light and promise. It’s a pretty insignificant spoiler to say that City of Ember ends in much the same way. But here, the ending is appropriate, the only possible manner in which a film of this nature could and should end.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.