FILM: Review: 9

Really? A whole movie?

Hi, I’m new. This is the first time I’m writing for Rhombus, so it remains to be seen whether this article ends up being good or cool enough to be published here. If you’re reading this, then… go me, I suppose. And thank you, Rhombus.

Don’t go see 9. I’m sorry if this is a belated warning and you got a little sadness injected into your weekend, but better late than never. Maybe you haven’t seen it. Maybe you were planning on seeing it. If so, don’t.

These are my two primary issues:

1) The writing was abysmal. None of the characters achieved that precious third-dimension and half of them didn’t even make it into the second, which is startling. Bad characters = bad movie. But this one didn’t stop there.

The story was so full of holes it bore greater resemblance to a sponge than a viable plot. Little burlap-beings run from evil-looking monster machines that want to… eat them? Steal their souls? Both? Well, you never quite get that part. At the end, when the mother of all monster machines is successfully defeated, you’d better be pretty darn satisfied, because no hint is given as to what these odd little creatures will do with their new found freedom from creepy, incomprehensible predators. The whole thing was most likely just an excuse to animate cool-looking, stylized robots fighting each other, like a feature-length advertisement for a computer graphics card.

2) Shane Acker is not a real director. He’s an effects and visual concepts man. He’s an animator. He has zero clue about real people, real emotions or real relationships. The way his characters interacted and moved negated the need for any dialog at all. It may as well have been a silent movie. To the audience’s perpetual dismay, however, it was not.

On the bright side, it was only 78 minutes long, which means the filmmakers here were far more merciful than our dear friend Michael Bay, he of the two-and-a-half hour Transformers 2. And it was really cool looking. And the sound design was pretty superb. So yeah, it’s a 78-minute ad.

If you must, rent this one on Blu-ray, watch it on a big HD screen and make your roommates foot half the rental cost. Really, it’s not worth more than a dollar and the jury’s still out as to whether it can justify its own scant length. You might end up just wanting an hour and twenty minutes of your life back.

Jordan Petersen is Rhombus’ newest film contributor. After this honest and scathing review, we’re happy to have him on-board.