Organized religion is literally puppy-kicking awful, if you believe The Prophet of Yonwood.
It Was His Sled: The fact that Ember is an Underground City is not found out until the end of the first book, but good luck finding someone who treats that like a spoiler. The movie gives this plot point away during the opening narration.
Paranoia Fuel: One doesn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the situation in The Prophet of Yonwood (the U.S. battling a terrorist nation that threatens total war) is a natural progression from what the world is going through today.
Complete Monster: Mayor Cole is a greedy, gluttonous coward who takes advantage of Ember's declining health for his own gain. Ordering the citizens of Ember to never leave under threat of imprisonment, Cole secretly steals countless amounts of emergency supplies from the storerooms while assuring his constituents that they will be safe when Ember finally faces apocalypse. In truth, Cole plans to abandon every last person to die and hide away with a luxurious bunker of his own design, willing to order the criminalization and arrest of children for trying to expose his deceit and betray even his closest allies to death so long as it assures himself a comfortable life once everyone else is dead.
Ham and Cheese: Mackenzie Crook plays a Cold Ham but his performance definitely sticks out.
Doon swapping jobs with Lina, meaning she gets to be a Messenger like she always wanted. She sound so happy as she tells everyone what her new job is.
After making it to the surface, the children discover nothing but darkness and coldness. Then the sun comes up and Lina gets to see the sky for the first time in her life. The way she says "it's blue!" is so sweet.
Even negative reviews of the film had nothing but praise for Saoirse Ronan's performance. The first film she made after her acclaimed supporting role in Atonement, critics called it a sign she would have a promising career.
Harry Treadaway got plenty of praise too, and parlayed it into a respectable film career, and eventually a starring role in Penny Dreadful.
Moe: Little Poppy is just adorable, and thankfully proves quite useful when escaping Ember.
Moment of Awesome: After spending most of the movie asleep and answering questions with "I don't know, it's not my job," Sul suddenly shows up at the climax, putting himself in massive danger to fix the water-wheel and open the way out of Ember. And when Doon asks him why?
It's a nice counterpoint to how the movie started. Ember's crisis happened because the mayors didn't do their jobs, and it ended because one old man remembered what his job was and did it.
Another excellent moment: the ending, where Lina and Doon tie a message to a rock and drop it down to Ember, so that the rest of the city can follow their path. The CGI is quite good for 2008, and the narration and music (the above-mentioned "One Last Message") come together to make it a genuinely awe-inspiring scene.
Lina and Doon tied their hope to a rock and tossed it down toward the city. The rock could've ended up on a roof, or been kicked into a gutter. But fate ran another course, and the message found its way. [Doon's father finds the message] Now the path was clear for all - all of us who kept the flame of Ember burning through the darkness, so that we could live again on the Earth, in the air and the light.
The sequence of Lizzie claiming she has a new boyfriend, only to reveal it as Looper. It's such an odd attempt at humor and it seems like such a Crack Pairing that it's bound to induce the wrong kind of laughing.
The filmmakers wanted to avoid modern slang, reasoning that Ember is several hundred years into the future. Unfortunately that results in a lot of characters speaking in lots of flowery big words like "dissuaded" that just sound forced.
Older Than They Think: This predated the Young Adult dystopia genre that would come into popularity in The New '10s. In particular, it preceded the work often considered to have popularized that genre, The Hunger Games, by nine and four years respectively in book and movie form. And Toby Jones starred in both.
Alternative Title(s):The City Of Ember, City Of Ember
perfectly fits over the end sequence with the rock and the credits that follow.