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City of Ember is one of those films that had some potential and some good initiative but ultimately succumbed to the fact that it was poorly-written, poorly-directed and resulted in being flat-out boring. The film tells the story of an unspecified moment in the future of humankind, where a few hundred people move underground and construct a subterranean city and after a while, their power supply is beginning to fail and two young children must seek the way back to the surface, which, for some reason, is forbidden.It's based on a book by Jeanne Duprau, and while I have not actually read it myself, I can tell there was a lot of imperative material left out when they adapted its content into a script, resulting in many glaring plot holes and enormous questions that do not get answered for us at any moment during the film's running time, which is considerably longer than it needs to be.According to one of my peers, in the book, it describes that humankind becomes locked in an intercontinental war and is quickly wiping out all life on the planet. This is the reason why the small number of people construct a giant city underground. In the movie, there is no explanation and so it seems to us that they just decided to build the City of Ember just for the experience.Visually, City of Ember is an acceptable accomplishment. There are some nice special effects sequences—excluding this gigantic, over-sized star-nosed mole that serves as one of the film's boring antagonists. The city's name is clear in its appearance. It glows an attractive ember-like color. The streets are dirty, the people are often unwashed, and their living conditions are by our standards, deplorable. So the filmmakers accomplished their task at making a convincing looking, end-of-the-world city.What they did not succeed in was using this set and its characters to keep us entertained or even generally interested. The film did not spark any interest for me. I was yawning twenty minutes into the film and I did not stop until the credits began to roll. The characters are all typical, two-dimensional figures who simply exist to fill up screen time and move the dull plot along toward the ending. It's a shame, for there are some great actors, including a few favorites of mine. But they're all boring characters. Bill Murray, commonly an interesting actor, was rather boring as the movie's major villain. Tim Robbins, one of my favorite actors, really served no purpose and thus his presence was nothing more than an unnoticed luxury. Probably the best character is Martin Landau's and he's only on screen for about fifteen minutes or so. And keep in mind, this is a movie that relies on its characters to keep moving. And so, if the characters are bland, the movie is bland.And that describes the film entire. It's not a horrible movie in any regards. It's just a bland one. And bland films don't entertain.
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