Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
9/26/09
A cold,
hard lesson for Hollywood, circa 2009: not everything was meant to
be a feature film. I think we can all agree that Viewmasters and
Slinkies and the video game Asteroids weren't meant for those distinctions,
although at least two of those are on the way (I honestly can't remember
if the Slinky got a movie deal or someone was just joking about that).
And while some graphic novels, old TV shows and “character toys” have successfully
made the transition to feature-length storytelling, many more have crashed
and burned. Yet another source of ready-made protomovies favored
by studio brass who just hate having to read a screenplay and imagine it
as a movie is the expansion of short films. Since May, we've seen
Battle for Terra and District
9 essentially tack whole other movies onto the end of the tales told
by their shorter counterparts, and now Focus Features backed by a big-name
crew of producers including Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambtov gives us an
80-minute version of Shane Acker's Oscar-nominated 2005 animated short
9. The 11-minute version is a bizarre, visually unique adventure
that tells you virtually nothing about why a living rag doll with the number
9 on his back is battling a soul-sucking monster made of pieces of skeletons
and found objects amidst a landscape of apocalyptic ruin. So it seems
easy enough to just stuff in backstory like so many rags and let it roll,
but the feature-length 9 finds itself as empty and familiar in its'
storytelling as its' visuals are inventive.
A tiny
rag doll (voice of Elijah Wood) with the number 9 on his back awakens in
an attic laboratory next to the body of a dead man. A round device
nearby seems important, so he places it inside his zippered chest.
He ventures outside and finds a ravaged post-apocalyptic world but meets
another doll with the number 2 (Martin Landau). This friendly tinkerer
uses parts of a smashed talking baby doll to give 9 a voice, and finds
the glowing green device. It clearly is important to him, but before
he can explain, they're attacked by The Beast, a creature made up of bleached
cat bones and pieces of junk. It grabs 2 and takes him to its' lair,
while 9 is found by 5 (John C. Reilly) and taken back to the dolls' “Sanctuary”
in an old church. There, 1 (Christopher Plummer) rules with a paranoid
iron fist, demanding that the dolls stay hidden. Humans, he tells
us, were wiped out by massive machines which, one by one, fell silent,
leaving only The Beast to hunt them. He's certain that it too will
finally leave them alone if only they hide long enough. But 9 convinces
5 to join him on a rescue mission, and they meet the brave 7 (Jennifer
Connelly), who's rejected 1's leadership and waged war against The Beast.
They track it to its' lair, and do rescue 2, but 9 foolishly places that
device in a slot that seems tailor-made for it, powering up The Machine.
That huge, multi-armed device is built to take the bits and pieces of everything
around it and to fashion them into weapons of war. And it does one
other thing, as it demonstrates when it captures 2 and sucks out his soul,
leaving only a limp pile of rags. The war resumes, with The Machine's
flying and crawling monsters picking off the dolls one by one. There
is only one hope: to return to the sight of 9's birth and solve the
mysteries of the dolls, The Machine, and the human scientist (Alan Oppenheimer)
who created them both.
9
exists for one reason: its' one great-looking animated adventure.
The post-apocalyptic landscape, with man's works reduced to so many spare
parts, plays host to the wonderfully realistic dolls and the ghoulish creations
of The Machine, which are pure nightmare food for any kids who defy the
PG-13 rating. Yeah, The Beast is nasty, and a later flying version
is no nicer. But it's the creature the filmmakers called The Seamstress
that'll really keep the lights on at night. Essentially a fabric
snake with the rag-corpse of 2 for a head, it hypnotizes its' pray with
flashing lights, grabs them and then sews them into its' slithering body.
The Machine itself is visually arresting with its' giant glowing red eye
surrounded by arms and claws.
But
as good as it all looks, it's also quite familiar. The Seamstress
has more than a little in common with Stephen King's It, while The
Machine looks like a Wachowski Bros Sentinel and steals the memorable but
little-seen act of the alien menace in Virus (1999). And the film
footage that eventually reveals the apocalyptic past was done better in
WALL*E. Not that any of this would matter
if the dolls were compelling characters or their plight more than a simple
matter of survival against a menace that torments them only because 9 did
something incredibly stupid and unmotivated. Since all that makes
9 our hero is that he's the doll who says “Let's do something!” even when
they shouldn't be doing anything, he's hard to rally behind. Sure,
1's a paranoid, power-mad jerk, but Plummer gives the movie's best vocal
performance so it's hard not to have more sympathy for him than the over-caffeinated
9 and 7. Honestly, the only likable doll is 2, thanks to Landau's
great vocal work and the script giving him more personality traits than
all the other characters put together, but the movie has the poor taste
to kill him first.
The
action sequences are fairly exciting, and the Seamstress' attack is plenty
creepy, but the story takes a deflating turn just when it should be hitting
its' stride thanks to the business with the dolls' souls. What makes
an eerie, poetic capper to the short in large part because it's not explained
in any way becomes hackneyed when beaten down by relentless details.
Of course, the movie both explains too much and too little about what happens
at the very end. All I know is when rag doll narrators want to start
getting all cocky with me about whose world it is now, my answer is that
we dead humans were still good enough to pay for our tickets! Didn't
see any rag dolls at my screening, lol.
9
will probably play best for the kids who're just old enough to think of
its' creepy monsters as the height of horror and young enough not to worry
about how little goes on and how little resonance it has. And fans
of pure visual oomph will also have a ball. Everyone else might be
better served to seek out the short on YouTube. It's got most of
the movie's strengths, is only 11 minutes long and, best of all, the dolls
don't talk. |
