9 Review

Many of you may already be familiar with the film: it was expanded from Acker's 2005 Oscar-nominated short of the same name. That wordless film involved the awakening of the title character and his attempt to survive in the blasted, dead world. As a short, free of dialogue it had the advantage of pulling viewers into its narrative, allowing them to construct some of the details of this broken world. In its conception, the original short was funereal, somber, and profound without even really trying. With his visually-rich and thematically vague feature-length remake, 9 filmmaker Shane Acker attempts to say... something about the human condition. 

The story is the hero's journey without much in the way of a hero: 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) has awakened in the workshop of his creator. Initially voiceless (a nod to the short) and lost he stumbles upon the elderly 2 (Martin Landau) who is subsequently kidnapped by one of the movie's ingeniously-designed mechanical monsters which prowl the world looking for a power source for a long-depowered uber machine. Of course, being the kind of movie it is - one bereft of twists, reversals, or any real cleverness - this machine will be activated, 9 will have to face it head on and rally the surviving robots of his diminutive tribe.

The problems with the film are many beginning with a lack of either character or charisma. Having a voice cast including John. C. Reilly, Christopher Plummer, and Crispin Glover, one would be hard-pressed to believe that this film would have a personality deficit. Unfortunately on the page and in their performances these characters are flat, with a limited set of goals and definable traits combined with flat line readings. My God! A flat line reading from Crispin "Hellion" Glover!

More troubling is the confused philosophy of the film. On the one hand it's about a Frankenstein story - a modern Promethean tale where the creator is undone by his creations. The end of the world came (as it usually does) through the overreach of technology and ambition. But at the same time there's 9's story in the present which is about throwing off the shackles of superstition and rejecting the incurious. These running morals are bound together and rebroadcast throughout the film adding up to very little in the end.

We're not even sure what our main character has learned at the end of it all in spite of nearly constant explanations of the plot and what's going on.

Visually - well, a little of this style goes a long way. Taken in small doses - say, in a 10 minute short, 9's "stitchpunk" style of handmade, cloth-covered robots and their skeletal adversaries are wonderful. Likewise the world is compellingly realized as a littered vista covered with bent and broken buildings and the still-fresh dead of the wars. But at feature length, fatigue sets in and the viewers wonders how many more faux 40's style structures and vehicles they can take in. Likewise the lack of visual distinction among the main characters further robs them of any sort of personality.  

The end result is a film much like its main character: it has been given a voice but doesn't have much to say.