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Reviews > Movie Reviews > 9…

9 Review
26 Oct 2009
Critics rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
9

Not to be confused with Rob Marshall's forthcoming musical, Nine (nor the Ryan Reynolds movie, The Nines).

This doesn’t feature a singing Daniel Day Lewis or Penelope Cruz in suspenders, more’s the pity. No, this doesn’t feature people at all – except briefly, in flashbacks.

We’ve been wiped out in a Terminator-style war with the machines we created. The earth is a burned out, gaseous battleground inhabited only by a fearsome mechanical beast and nine rag dolls. Or what’s left of them. By the time numero 9 wakes up, several of his predecessors have already gone to meet their maker. The others have holed up in a cathedral, where 1 has taken to wearing a bishop’s garb, and 6 seems to have lost it completely. When 2 is snatched by the beast, only the newbie wants to go out and save him…

Cast details

While several animated films this year have had real adult appeal – including Coraline and Up – 9 is targeted primarily at teenagers and sci-fi fans. Younger kids will find it disturbing, and the BBFC has classified it 12A. Like District 9 (another nine!) Shane Acker?s feature is expanded from an award-winning short (also called 9), and where the live action movie had Peter Jackson as mentor-producer, here that role is played by Tim Burton.

Unfortunately what is visually arresting in an 11-minute short can become monotonous over an hour and a half. The movie’s barren, wasted landscapes are impressively noxious, but there isn’t much variety there, and the rag dolls – uh, “stitch-punks” – are only expressive to the degree that they’re each endowed with one defining characteristic and recognisable vocal chords (the voice cast includes Elijah Wood as the valiant but disaster-prone 9, Christopher Plummer as 1, John C Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover and Martin Landau).

9

Another Burton protégé, Pamela Pettier (The Corpse Bride) wrote the screenplay, and while she has devised enough cliffhanger episodes to keep the thing moving along the dialogue is utterly banal and the story is pretty skimpy, albeit decked out with portentous allegorical heft.

Another Burton protégé, Pamela Pettier wrote the screenplay

Intriguingly the film seems to be set, not in the 21st or 22nd century, but rather midway through the twentieth, as if Armageddon came as an alternate WWII. The movie’s stand out sequence involves Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a haunting requiem for humanity in this mist-shrouded, rubble-strewn planet.

9 Reviews

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