9 [spoilers probable]

[Johnny]

I just got back from seeing Tim Burton's 9.

9 is a doll that wakes up in a laboratory, to a lifeless planet and a city in ruins. Near him he finds a hemisphere. He guesses it is important, so he zips it up inside of his burlap body. He sees another burlap doll trudging along in the street far below, and rushes down to find it. The mute 9 is frightened by the death, destruction and decay of his new world. He catches up to the other doll, who is named 2. 2 finds a speaker to give 9 a voice. He also finds the strange hemisphere when he installs the speaker. 'You found it!' he exclaims. Only before he can explain anything the pair are set upon by an enormous and malicious mechanical cat. The cat takes 2 away, and picks up the hemisphere with its claws. The injured 9 wakes up in a cathedral, where he has been attended to by 5. They are immediately intruded upon by 1, the ruler of the doll people, and 8, who looks like the Michelin Man. 1 forbids them to go in search of 2. Will 9 and 5 disobey? Will they find 2? Will they discover the secret of the mysterious hemisphere? Why does 6 draw interpretations of the hemisphere? What does 1 know that he isn't telling? And what is that thing lurking in the shadows?

9 seems less like a Tim Burton film than it does some of the stories in Heavy Metal. I don't know if you remember the 'zine back in the early-'80s, but many of its stories featured bleak landscapes after horrendous wars. Another feature of many HM stories, particularly the ones by European authors and artists, were that they did not have a great deal of exposition. 9 does use exposition, but not so much that it explains everything. Like the old HM stories, the audience is expected to accept the situation as it is.

I was disappointed by the action scenes. The 'villains' developed too quickly, and the 'battles' didn't do much for me. I liked 7, but my favourite characters were 3 and 4. Ten of us went to see 9, but I did not attend the post-film get-together. The husband of the organiser said he was disappointed in the film, and another guy said 'I tend to be logical, so I think the film could have been better. Some people just communicate that way.' I don't think 9 is Tim Burton's best effort, but I liked the film. Did I like it well enough to buy the DVD? Probably not, unless I want a complete Tim Burton collection. I liked the animation, I liked the characters, and I liked the story; but I thought the story could have been a little meatier, and the action scenes better done. I reckon I'd give 9 about a 7.

[jali]

Your description reminded me a the feeling I got when I watched the folowing shorts: http://www.openfilm.com/videos/ark/

http://www.openfilm.com/videos/the_j...nt_short_film/

[terrifel]

My theory is that composer Danny Elfman has possession of some horribly compromising blackmail material on Tim Burton. Maybe it's photos of Burton wearing a pastel golf shirt and Dockers. Maybe it's a tape showing him in a hotel bed with Ron Howard enjoying The Sound of Music in a purely irony-free manner. Maybe it's DNA evidence that Burton is actually a blonde. But whatever it is, it would totally destroy Burton's credibility were it to surface.

Ever since then, when Elfman runs down his bank account to the point where he can no longer afford his hookers and smack, he gives Burton a call and forces him to pay for another movie score.

Sometimes Burton is actually working on a feature at the time, and it works out well for both of them. Other times, however, Burton has nothing on hand; so he has to scramble around to finance a project that can use whatever pile of generic bombast Elfman throws at him.

This time around, Burton decided to throw his weight behind novice writer/director Shane Acker, whose previous experience consisted pretty much entirely of a single animated short film entitled, “9 Minute Homage to the Cinematic Master of Dark Whimsy, Tim Burton (Love and Kisses, Your Biggest Fan Shane Acker).”

According to IMDb, Acker’s only other significant film credit was as an animator for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Purely by coincidence, when it came time to expand his 9-minute short to a feature length film, Acker padded the concept by introducing a villain embodied by a single burning red eye in a giant dark tower, and then cast Elijah Wood as the unlikely hero.

I use the term “hero” advisedly here, because all the evidence of the plot seems to indicate that Elijah Wood’s character is actually the villain, insofar as all the destruction in the film is actually caused by him. Despite the film’s desperate attempt to paint Christopher Plummer’s character as wrongheaded and cowardly, it seems pretty obvious that Elijah Wood’s character, 9, is the one responsible for placing everyone in danger.

Fortunately none of it seems to matter in the end, as it is revealed that 9 and all his companions are merely lingering echoes of the last living human soul on Earth, who also happens to be the scientist responsible for the killer machine that destroyed all organic life on Earth. According to the movie, the soul of a mad scientist is made up of the following ingredients:

1. Pope
2. Dumpster diver
3. Mute librarian
4. Mute librarian
5. Surgeon
6. Crispin Glover
7. Transgendered Ninja
8. Steroid addict
9. Retard

This is useful to know, as it means that I am almost halfway towards being a mad scientist myself.

You know, movie: you were already pushing your luck by asking me to identify emotionally with these dammit dolls as Earth's only remaining survivors. It is a fine line, balancing the preciousness of the concept against the larger pathos of humanity's extinction. So you pretty much lost me completely when you decided that, of nine scrap-fabric homunculi forged from the consciousness of mankind's destroyer, one of them should be a hernia truss dressed up like the Pope.

Can anyone tell me what the actual plan was? The scientist puts his soul energy into the dolls, using a talisman designed to plug into the killer machine. So presumably the idea was for the dolls to sacrifice their soul energy to fix the machine. But this never happens, and in any case the killer machine was shut down until the talisman was plugged into it. Once activated, the machine is obsessed with absorbing the soul energy, but the energy doesn’t seem to change its behavior or affect it otherwise. And in the end, the machine is deactivated again and the soul energy is dispersed anyway. So what was the point again?

At the beginning of the film, the population of Earth is nine dolls and an undead cyborg cat. At the end of the film, the population of Earth is four dolls (one of which is the doll responsible for the deaths of the other five), and possibly some germs. There appeared to be some germs in the rain, although I was not sure whether these were supposed to be actual physical germs or just spirit germs. Anyone remember the Final Fantasy movie, where the glowing snow comes down at the end, and Donald Sutherland’s character exclaims, “It’s warm!” I think there needs to be a 100-year cinematic moratorium on CG deus ex machina weather phenomena, and also on evil machines with a glowing red eye or eyes. Scientists: don’t build robots with red eyes. You are just asking for trouble.

Anyway: this movie annoyed the gravy out of me. It’s as if all the ostentatious treacle of a Don Bluth film were boiled down into a resinous paste and crystallized into black tar heroin. The really irksome thing is that all the filler material not in the original short film—the alternate-history early 1930’s-era fascist state and the killer robot war—all that superfluous background padding looked far more interesting to me than any part of the main plot.

In summary, Tim Burton should be beaten across the face with a coal shovel until his mouth bleeds teeth. Or until he stops encouraging imitators. Or until I get my nine bucks back.