What the world needs now, thought the producers of 9, is a
really cute version of Terminator. Like, a Captain Kangaroo sort
of thing, only with killer robots that have murdered everyone on Earth.
But to keep it upbeat, there will still be a tiny vestige of humanity
in the form of adorable puppets who live in the burned-out
wastelands.
To make it perfect, the lead puppet, known as 9, is voiced by Elijah
Wood. Most of us remember Wood best for his role as Boy Playing
Videogame in Back to the Future Part II, but he also had a small
role in Three Part Fantasy Geek Spectacular Elf-Fest playing
Frodo, the hairy-footed moppet with the heart of gold. He’s basically
cuteness incarnate, and his voice sounds like a slightly more feminine
version of Shirley Temple run through a marshmallow-sweetening
machine.
The story starts with 9 waking up to see that his creator is dead
and the world has been blasted to bits by mechanical Nazi super-bots. 9
wanders out and is found by another robot, 2, who promptly gets taken
away by a mechanized cat-skeleton. 9 is then taken to the enclave of
puppet-bots, including the imperious 1 (Christopher Plummer), the
artistic 6 (Crispin Glover), the clownish 5 (John C. Reilly) and the
lone female-bot of the future, 7 (Jennifer Connelly).
It’s weird that there’s only one girl-bot, but, to be fair, none of
the robots have genitals, so I guess it’s more like there’s only one
female hired to voice one of the bots, which is great, because if we
give women jobs, they’ll stop shaving or something.
Anyway, the visuals in 9 are a mixture of steam-punk and
knit-craft. If you like that sort of thing, then you probably spend all
day reading boingboing.net, so you
don’t have time to go to the movies. But if your Internet connection
goes down, you can always check out 9 and just stare and drool,
because they’ve really mastered those styles. I’d note that the
computer-generated 3-D animation is freakishly fluid, but that’s how
computer-generated 3-D animation looks these days, so praising the
filmmakers for getting that right would be like giving third-graders
high marks in math for using a calculator.
9 is, nonetheless, nicely filmed. There’s some real concern
for proper framing, lighting and clear storytelling, and at no point is
there a high-speed action sequence shot entirely in close-up. But
failing to get things terribly wrong doesn’t make for a good film. It
does make for a mediocre film, though, and 9 is quintessentially
mediocre: easy to sit through, reasonably well-paced, and just stupid
enough to be forgettable.
At its worst, it attempts to be deep. There’s a warning about
technology getting out of control, but I think we’ve all heard that one
before, and it’s not like saying it again with puppets makes it any
more powerful. My friend Smith thought that it was evocative of the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger, but I’m not sure if that’s because of
the paranoia about technology, or because the film seems to be set in
an alternate-reality Nazi Germany.
Or so it turns out in the explain-y part of the movie. For a while,
9 proceeds with a sense of mystery. The lead robot is mute, and
the world is mysteriously empty. But pretty soon, all the bots start
talking in goofy cartoon voices, and lots of backstory is shoveled up
in the form of expository sequences. The sequences are animated, so
it’s not like it’s just talking puppet heads, but still, they’re very
much tacked-on and artificial.
9 is based on a short film of the same name in which the
robots are silent, and little explanation is given. In this extended
remix version, the attempt to explain everything backfires, because the
explanation is an inconsistent mix of science, magic and the need to
have cute robots carry makeshift Mad Max weapons while fighting fascist
machines.
It’s basically what you’d get if you asked Ralph Bakshi to make a
kids’ movie, or if the Muppets took Manhattan by means of military
force and nuclear weapons. Everything is presented so children and tea
party-ers can understand it, and the ending wraps things up with a
mystical nod toward spirituality, or whatever the robot equivalent of
that is.
Definitely not the worst thing you’ll see this fall, 9 is
nonetheless not a film I’d recommend, unless you haven’t yet been
exposed to its central message, which is something like, “Evil is bad;
cuteness is good.”
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.
