9 (2009)

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): In a “post-Apocalyptic” world, the only living beings seem to be animated ragdolls — which Wikipedia tells me are called “Stitchpunks”, though I’m pretty sure that term was never used in the film. The Stitchpunks don’t have names, but are distinguished from each other by numbers on their backs. The action mostly revolves around 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood), a relative newcomer to the rest of the team.

9 first learns of the existence of other Stitchpunks when he meets 2 (Martin Landau). 2 gives 9 a voice box, but is then pursued and captured by a robotic “cat beast”. 9 is then rescued by 5 (John C. Reilly), and the two of them then set out to help recover 2. Along the way, they meet up with 7 (Jennifer Connelly) and learn a little bit about what happened to make the world the way it is now. It turns out that a scientist (Alan Oppenheimer) created an intelligent machine that was supposed to help mankind, but an evil dictator took control of the machine and used it to try to take over the world. The subsequent wars resulted in the widespread devastation the Stitchpunks now see.

There is still hope of returning the world to its former glory, however. The Scientist put a bit of his soul into each of the nine Stitchpunks and created an amulet that could be used to destroy the Fabrication Machine should such action be necessary. 9 learns of this from watching a how-to tutorial, and then shares his knowledge withi the remaining Stitchpunks. 1 (Christopher Plummer) sacrifices himself so the amulet can be recovered, which results in the destruction of the Fabrication Machine. The film ends with a new rainfall, which seems to indicate that life on the planet will begin again.

Liked:

• Hmm, I guess I liked the fact that this film was only 79 minutes long and therefore wasn’t quite as torturous as it might have been.

Disliked:

• The storyline took far too long to develop. Why did audiences have to wait until the middle of the film to find out what the Stitchpunks were and what they were trying to do? That sort of thing is usually spelled out in the first 15 minutes or so. The only reason I kept watching this was that it was Family Movie Night and my 7-year-old chose this title.
• The lack of dialogue was annoying. I hate just watching endless action scenes, so the beginning of this film sucked for me and I spent most of it on my netbook writing a review for something I bought from fatburner.org. (I felt the same about Wall-E, BTW.)
• Did anyone actually care about the Stitchpunks? They weren’t developed as characters — despite having distinguishing characteristics, which is a completely different thing. I felt no connection to these things, so I wasn’t invested in their success nor was I affected by their “deaths”.

Rating:

9 just wasn’t my kind of movie at all. It was boring, hard to follow at the beginning, and lacking in any kind of interesting developments along the way. Since I base my ratings on how entertained I was and how likely I would be to see the film again, I give this 2 stars out of 5.