9
  
reviewed by Rad
Bennett
Photo © Focus Features
|
Many of the better films of the past few years have been
animated. But unfortunately, most people still see them as nothing more than cartoons.
When I saw 9 yesterday afternoon, there were several families with small children
in the audience, and no one seemed to notice the PG-13 rating. I have to admit that the
kids were quiet. Perhaps they were stunned into silence by the film’s incontestably
bleak visions.
9, which director Shane Acker expanded into a
feature length from his Academy Award–nominated short of the same name, takes place
in an apocalyptic future in which humans have vanished from the earth. The landscape has
been bombed and burnt, and only ruins remain. Ruling the world are machines, contraptions
that have been patterned on nature’s designs. The head machine, with its camera lens
for an eye, looks like a cyclopean spider, and the flying machine that appears earlier in
the movie resembles a giant dragon.
In the middle of this steampunk vision, we discover 9
(voiced by Elijah Wood), a burlap sock puppet stitched together with a zipper running up
his front and big, lens-like eyes. He finds others of his kind, who are logically numbered
1 through 8. Apparently, a mad scientist, who must have been the last person on earth,
sewed the nine creatures together from household scraps and somehow gave each a part of
his soul. The main fault of this film, from a science-fiction perspective, is that its
parts never quite fit into a coherent whole. You simply have to accept the plot and roll
with it.
An adult will come away from this movie with a profound
impression of the way it looks but with little knowledge of what happens in it. The
age-old "if we work together, we can thwart the enemy" idea is clear, but it
seems as if the director wanted to say something deeper but just couldn’t fit it into
the script. The story and visuals are rated PG-13, but the dialogue seems to be aimed at a
much younger audience.
Still, the movie is worth seeing (if you are a teen or an
adult) for its design and look. The animation, done in Canada, is smooth and impressive.
Though I’m sure most of the movie is CGI, it doesn’t look like it, and
that’s a compliment. The soundtrack is very noisy, with startling use of the
surrounds. As eye and audio candy, 9 is tremendously effective, but it could have
been much more. |
