Two nights ago, I caught the sci-fi flick City of Ember.  Okay, so this film was meant for a younger audience, but hey, why should kids have all the sci-fi fun?  I really wasn’t eager to see Max Payne because I loved the games and I had a feeling I wouldn’t care for the movie.  But it turns out that City of Ember held my attention for the duration of the movie and was a fairly enjoyable ride.

The basic plot is as follows (I don’t consider this a spoiler because it is all narrated in the first two minutes of the film…a bit of heavy-handed exposition I didn’t care for):  There was a catastrophe/armageddon/disaster type thing going on.  So a group of scientists (or just a bunch of people in blue coats) decided to create the City of Ember and populate it with some people.  They never got into the entrance requirements…was it based on SAT scores?  Well, anyway, the City of Ember was safe from whatever was going on in the rest of world.  However, it was only designed to last for 200 years and a box with instructions was given to the first mayor.  You would think they would have given a couple of copies to other people or even engraved them on every building but apparently they weren’t as clever as they thought.  Well, guess what - the box goes missing and people have forgotten about the 200 years thing.  It is now past that time and the generator which runs Ember is failing.  As I said, this is all narrated in the first couple of minutes, unnecessarily I think.

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