Monday Movie Reviews #2: 9

I'm not happy with this post title, but what can you do? The title of the movie is: 9. It's suitably esoteric and intriguing, but it is difficult to use it in a review. What did I think of this movie? In a word, it made me angry.

 The movie starts promisingly enough. The animation is well-done and the patchwork little creatures are endearingly imagined and expressive. The voice-acting is middling, but that's what you get when you use famous actors and not actual voice-actors (and are not Pixar). As it opens, we see the eponymous character gaining (regaining?) conciousness and starting to puzzle out who he is, where he is and, most importantly, the why to all these questions.

Nothing wrong so far, right? It's not great, but who expects every movie to be so? As the story progresses, 9 meets other similar creatures to himself with other numbers for names and marked upon all their backs. The setting seems to be a post-apocalyptic Europe that died during a dystopian war reminiscent of nothing so much as George Orwell's 1984.

Anyway, I don't think I'm giving away too much by saying that the little numbered creatures have to fight an evil machine bent on their destruction. Of course, the only really competent warrior is the woman of the group, because we know that's usually how it works in real life. Seal Team 6 is, after all, almost entirely composed of the distaff members of the species. But leaving aside the little PC pieties that almost all modern movies must nod to, it seemed an enjoyable and fairly straightforward flick about the struggles of these creatures to understand their purpose and place and fight for their survival.

Uh, no. The last 15-20 minutes of the movie make no sense whatsoever. It feels like nothing so much as that they ran out of money and had to wrap it all up a lot faster than they wanted. The solutions were pulled out of thin air, actions were taken without any reason, knowledge was obtained, not even by deus ex machina, but without any apparent source at all. The final scene was the worst of all. It was about as bad as Chewbacca living on Endor.

It occurs to me now that the other possible reason for ending the movie this way is related to the fact that it first was done as an enigmatic short. I haven't seen the short, but the story I heard is that it was more open-ended and didn't seem as compelled to wrap things up in a neat bow at the end. I can see the writer being pressured to make the ending a bit more Hollywood for the feature film release. Anyway, when I turned it off, I was very angry about how it ended; it felt rather like a betrayal of how the first 3/4 of the movie had gone.