City of Ember

Directed by Gil Kenan. Starring Bill Murray, Saoirse Ronan, Harry Treadaway, Tim Robbins, Toby Jones, Martin Landau PG cert, gen release, 95 min

***

IT'S BEEN a month or two since we last saw the world perish on screen, so it is a pleasure to welcome this unusual steampunk adventure from the director of Monster House.

Perhaps the oddest fact about City of Ember, adapted from a popular novel by Jeanne DuPrau, is that it was shot entirely in and around Belfast. There was a time when the Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission might have been a tad reluctant to allow film-makers to represent the city as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but peace brings confidence and, while regeneration takes place above, Belfast's lower depths give a stirring performance as a grim underground metropolis of the future.

The details of the disaster that sent the world's citizens beneath the earth remain obscure. The threat is, however, severe enough for scientists to construct a subterranean world of dark streets and peeling wallpaper - imagine Stevenage in the early 1950s - and to entrust the details of the means for escape to one individual.

Those vital instructions are contained in a sealed box which is passed down from mayor to mayor and is programmed to open 200 years after the city's founding. When one mayor drops dead in office, the box goes missing. It takes two young people ( Narnia's spirited Harry Treadaway and our own unstoppable Saoirse Ronan) to uncover the truth.

At a confusingly brisk 95 minutes, City of Emberfeels rushed. Indeed, certain key details of the plot appear to have been dumped on the cutting-room floor. But the picture is overstuffed with seductively musty production design and rich in eccentric performances from its stellar cast . Playing the current, evil mayor, Bill Murray barely gets into second gear, but his lazy insouciance suits the seedy character quite nicely. "We need more than answers. We need solutions," he says to the populace in a piece of archetypically vapid political rhetoric.

The trimming down of the plot has left us with something a little too linear and lacking in background noise, but few other films released this autumn will play quite so well to the entire family. The eventual director's cut may, I suspect, be better still.