Director: Shane Acker
Starring (voices of): Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly & John C. Reilly
Visually very impressive with some entertaining ideas and sequences, 9 is held back by a plot that feels too over familiar leaving the film more memorable for it’s visuals than it’s story.
Originally seeing life as a short animated film by Shane Acker, 9 went onto to impress film producers/directors Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov leading to Acker to expand upon his original short for this feature length version. Featuring plenty of impressive CGI animation and with Acker able to further explore his imagination and flesh out the world he created in his short film, 9 looks incredibly impressive. However, with it also becoming necessary to expand upon the storyline of his 11 minute short to run 79 minutes for the feature, 9 compares less favourably in it’s storyline with too much religious sub-text seemingly shoehorned into the plot.
In the far future, the Earth is a wasteland and the human race extinct following a massive war between man and machines. When a small robot made of gears and sackcloth named 9 (Wood) awakens in this world he goes searching for answers finding other robots like himself, given life by a recently deceased scientist, and also finds more dangerous robots out to seek their destruction including a super weapon given life accidentally by 9. Banding together with the other robots like himself with some eager to assist like 5 (Reilly) and 7 (Connelly) and others resistant to conflict like the ancient 1 (Christopher Plummer), 9 searches for a way to defeat the enemy robot and discover the truth behind the world’s destruction and his own creation.
9 will be a film best remembered for the imagination involved in the creation of its world and its inhabitants more than the storyline itself. Using CGI, the creation of this war torn future is very impressive and, rather than being a destroyed utopia such as many future-set films employ, 9’s future world bears elements of Steampunk in that this world could easily be the ruins of European cities following WWII with even newsreel style footage being used at one point to fill the characters and audience in on the events that resulted in this future coming about. Enough thought is also used in the design of the nine heroic robots in the film using the cute sackcloth look as a template but giving each robot a unique look to suit their personality while the evil robots are a mix of huge attack droids bearing similarities to the alien ships of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (which appears to be an influence in the film) and scarier looking constructs built out of spare parts, even skeletons, like a snake-like creature with needle-like claws and a deformed dolls head on top being particularly disturbing. However, despite the strong visuals and imagination on show, the story itself is somewhat lacking. As soon as the religious sub-text woven into the story becomes more obvious then the outcome of the storyline and the genesis of the robots become somewhat predictable with a conclusion that is so saccharine that it feels out of place with the tone of the rest of the film. The heroic robots, the nine, while interesting also conform to specific stereotypes of hero, sceptic, muscle, heroine and best friend without much in the way of character development.
Given that each of the nine robots conform to stereotypical roles, the voice cast have little to add beyond ensuring those personalities shine through. All give decent performances such as Elijah Wood in the lead role of 9, or Jennifer Connelly as 7 though none are particularly noteworthy. Veteran actors such as Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau add some gravitas to their character’s words and John C. Reilly makes 5 quite sympathetic but, much like the film’s plot, the performances are less memorable than the film’s visuals.
Visually stunning and filled with tons of imagination, 9 is a film that could develop a cult following based on its concepts alone however, as impressive as the film looks, the storyline and the personalities of the characters are considerably less well developed resulting in a fairly average Sci-Fi animation even though it is certainly a good looking one.
Rating: 3/5
