I saw City of Ember last weekend with shelleycat. I thought it was pretty good, she thought the plot wasn't very coherent or something. I actually thought they did a pretty good job of foreshadowing a lot of things. The biggest problem was probably the usual one of convenient coincidences, however this is partially mitigated by the fact that the main characters had to work at getting to the spot where such coincidences were even possible. (The city of Ember has the dumbest method of deciding your profession evar. At your coming of age ceremony the job you will hold for the rest of your life is chosen for you... by drawing random slips of paper out of a bag. One wonders how they managed to survive the 200 and some odd years before the life support system started becoming a problem.)

I'm tempted to get the books now, both to see what happened after the end of the movie and to see if the books actually give any details about what the calamity was that forced humans underground (and why 200 years would be enough for whatever it was to get fixed.)

It was also interesting that the female lead kept reminding me very strongly of simransmiles :)