A little used though not unique SF concept, the last city of Earth is lost and buried and a few of the inhabitants decide to find a way out (Against The Fall Of Night, Logan's Run, and another one I forget the name of come to mind as other examples). For the most part it's pretty good, the mystery and puzzles to be solved being the strong point. However, while the final adventure and chase sequence is pretty good, details of its logic fall apart enough to bring the movie down a notch or two.

Okay, so this may be nitpicking, and go away if you don't like spoilers, but the whole exit plan leaves a few gaps. First, thewy leave by way of the river under Ember, then though some river rapids going down, then a final log-jammer drop way down until they come to a calm pool and a 2-boat landing with someplace around fifty steps up to the surface. At this point they've traveled at least a couple of miles horizontally. The nitpick? After they go up those fifty steps after having dropped down about another couple hundred feet, they get to see just how deeply Ember is buried, and it's about half a mile. They went dowm to go up? Leaving aside that this single boat width rapids is not the best way to plan the evacuation of a city, much less if this is the route that the first inhabitants used to get to Ember in the first place (necessitating going up a huge rapids drop to get down), the top ground-level hole they look down to see how far Ember is down is about 20 feet away from where they came out; they traveled a couple miles horizontally to get 20 feet away from directly above their city? The geography makes no sense! When they kept going down I expected them to come out of the side of a mountain as that is the only way they could go down and excape from underground. And for such a well-planned city you'd think someone would have thought of something better than the Roaring Rapids to get them out of there with. Myself? I'd go looking for that gynormous elevator that had to have been used to get all the constructionm equipment half a mile down to build the city in the first place. Another missed oportunity is the statue in the city square you just KNOW is going to do something, maybe the main exit to leave the city en-mass through, and it does do something- squirts out water as a fountain and nothing more. If it was me, I'd have put the city on hydraulics for a big dramatic city-sized elevator sequence, scaring the bejeavers out of the city populous as it gets stuck halfway up before finally breaking the surfacxe into a new day.

And do you think the Builders left so much as a warehouse topside with stuff like farming equipment or such to help the newly arrived? Nothing in sight. The epilog to this story would be 85% of the city populous dying withing two months from exposure, starvation, and wild animals, with the rest going early-day native-american.

Okay, so except for the last reel, the thing made sense; at least they steered away from the exact details of what killed off the Earth and put the city underground; avoids instilling additional conflicts of logic that way. Buyt if you don't mind that last bit, the movie's really pretty good. Not to mention Martin Landau.