9
Directed by Shane Acker, the film 9 is the latest animated flick but if you thought it’s for your kids you are mistaken absolutely. In fact, the target audience for ‘9’ is the growing teens, but to me it seemed to play more with maturing crowd that would appreciate detailed work of art, set designs and animation.
The story unfolds with rag-doll-like creature with thick fingers and binocular eyes with number 9 embossed on its back. This creature wakes up to find itself amidst the rubble of some bombed-out landscape. What happens is that a war gets triggered between man and machines (ah, the good old usual stuff) as an invention made by a scientist to strengthen the defense of the planet gets stolen by some tyrants that decide to wipe out mankind.
In the ruins of cityscape, this number 9 ventures out with tottering legs only to meet similar creatures #1 through #8. In no time all of these 9 rag-doll-like creatures get embroiled in a fight with a Beast that resemble one red-eyed monster.
One should not question the plot of the movie as it lacked any logical reasoning. There was no reason to devise some life forms only to be destroyed by enemies. The purpose seemed to be more to create scenes and shots of some apocalyptic fights similar to some all-action movies. But the action scenes involving mechanical bats, mechanical spider things are mostly incomprehensible as you hardly come to know where you are and what this mechanical junk piles going to do. It seemed to me that the essence of Terminator Salvation has been weaved into epic style characteristics of the film Lord of the Rings to produce 9. An imaginative epic like ambience is created but the story failed to develop as the movie proceeded.
Scene from 9
The band of rag-like doll creatures fights the red-eyed monster to recover the chip that has some ancient symbols embossed on it. The theme of the movie was interesting at the beginning but it detoured somewhere in the middle with repetitive scenes and dialogues and came to a sudden halt at the end. The audience gets to understand what is happening only towards the end of the movie which I felt would have been better, if explained earlier.
All the characters from number 1 to number 9 had their numbers stitched at the back and hence could be differentiated, otherwise they all looked similar. These characters are voiced by different actors. Number 9 was made the youngest and number 1 was the leader. But number 9 was considered to be the smartest as nine was in a mission to convince others against number one so that all can poke around the ruins.
Overall the movie is worth seeing for people who would enjoy detailed art creativity. Visual effects are simple enthralling but the weakness lies in the under-developed storyline. The post-movie discussion will rotate on thoughts such as what the future holds and why should man build robots only to destroy mankind, so on and so forth.
| Film | 9 |
|---|---|
| Cast | Voice provided by Christopher Plummer Martin Landau John C. Reilly Crispin Glover Jennifer Connelly Fred Tatasciore Elijah Wood Alan Oppenheimer Tom Kane Helen Wilson |
| Director | Shane Acker |
| Screen Writers | Shane Acker, Pamela Pettler |
| Producers | Timur Bekmambetov, Tim Burton, Dana Ginsburg, Jinko Gotoh, Jim Lemley |
| Runtime | 1 Hour 19 Minutes |
| Rating | 3.5/5 |
Posted on Saturday, September 12th, 2009 at 2:32 pm