Imagine you’ve awoken in a future where the world is destroyed and you are one of the few still living. You are being hunted by scrap-metal robots and you’re a sentient rag doll. Chances are, you are a character in Shane Acker’s debut animated feature “9.”
The film begins with the construction of Number 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood), a hand-sewn creature brought to life in a time when humanity has passed and the world is in ruin. With the help of creatures like him, 9 goes out to discover what happened to the humans, why he was made, and what must be done to make the world a safe place once again.
As an animated film with a very mature tone, “9” had a hard time finding an appropriate audience. Even the theaters showing the movie are having a hard time deciding who will watch it, opening the flick with previews ranging from darker kids movies such as “The Vampire’s Assistant” to the Coen Brothers’ R-rated “A Serious Man.” And at 79 minutes in length, “9” is clearly cut with an eight-year-old’s attention span in mind. Still, I wonder if a child going to grasp the moral issues integral to the film and if parents want their kids watching dolls get their souls ripped out through their eyes?
On a good note, the action looks fantastic in “9.” Since our main characters are mere inches tall, explosions are that much more massive and villains that much more formidable. Much of the film plays off as a cat-and-mouse game, with a great deal of sneaking as our pint-sized characters journey across the post-apocalyptic wasteland towards an encounter with their monstrous robotic antagonist. Indeed, if this were a video game, I would definitely play it.
However, action is not everything. As exhilarating as the battles are, it is the quiet scenes that tear the film down. Instead of using the silence after the storm to develop strong characters and challenge the audience’s sympathies, writer Pamela Pettler leaves Number 9 helplessly chattering to his uninterested companions while waiting for the next villain to come crashing through the window.
The character design was what excited me about “9.” With each character given a different set of skills, and very distinct voices (ranging from John C. Reilly playing Number 5, to Martin Landau playing Number 2), how could their portrayal and interaction not be interesting?
Sadly, Pettler and Acker lacked any subtlety in their crafting of the protagonists. Take, for instance, Number 1, voiced by Christopher Plummer. A very strict, hardened creature, he has seen death, and now his defense is absolute fear, hiding in the shadows and avoiding retaliation at all cost. And in a singular epiphany, Acker uses a sudden change of heart in the final scenes of the movie to soften Number 1 and make him a hero.
Much to my dismay, Acker never takes time to extract the wonderful complexity of this character, and instead resorts to stale cliché, making him the blind religious figure who perpetually disagrees with reason. This half-baked approach to character development, and storytelling overall, ruins the rich ingredients Acker was given.
This film sets itself up to make some great point about humanity. Good sci-fi and apocalyptic tales present metaphors for today and carry implications from the distant future right to our front door. However, as a lack of foresight, Acker tells the story with ambiguous morality and no message for the real world outside of “Finding out the truth might kill your friends, but it’s still totally worth it.”
The final scene of the film builds up to a strange ritual of releasing the captured souls of their dead companions, not to bring them back to life but to let them “really die.” Weren’t they already dead? Then why confuse the issue further? Just the same as when the film began, the camera does a quick zoom-out and drops the curtain on the, apparently relieved, surviving characters, the lone survivors of an empty and desolate world. In the end, “9” is not worth a night at the movies.
