by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2009
Theater-bound science fiction movies of the 2000's seem to have a sad but iron-clad rule: the wilder the CGI, the plainer the story. 9 is right in step with this rule.
9 is a post-holicost setting in which the people and big robots have fought a recent war to mutual extinction, and all that are left are WWII-blasted looking ruins, nine little woven androids playing the good guys, and a few metallic robot thingys, headed by a chief metallic robot, playing the bad guys.
The settings are fun to watch, and it's nice that its a small setting rather than a big save-the-universe setting, but beyond that, the story is quite ho-hum. Today, I sympathize strongly with the early developers of TV, whose collective jaws dropped when this marvelous invention of their's became the home to mostly quiz shows, variety shows and sit-coms. Today, I can shout as they did in the 1950's, "What a waste of this marvel!" In both cases we should be telling new stories with the new breakthrough, not rehashing stories that have been told a thousand times before!
OK, I'll get off my soapbox now. Here are the technofiction flaws I saw.
o There is a lot of mixing up of time periods and cultures -- which I wouldn't have minded so much if the story had been more unconventional. There is a mix ranging from turn of the 20th century War of the Worlds battlemechs, through 40's totalitarianism bureaucrats, to modern coin-shaped batteries. There is a lot of conventional British-based symbolism: The good androids hang out in a church, the bad robots hang out in a smoking factory. We know we've reached the end, and the good guys have won, because it starts gently raining. We know the old world order is gone because we see both the church and the factory burn. Once again, I wouldn't mind this if it weren't so I've-seen-this-all-before predictable.
o There are some size fluctuations. The androids are mostly small, but late in the movie they are man-handling... whoops! android-handling a WWII British eight-pounder and shooting up the bad robot with it. You have to be closer to man-sized to do that, and the bad guy creature has to grow larger so it can both get hit and survive taking the hit. Likewise, they are big and strong enough to push uphill a 55 gallon drum filled with oil? I'm man-sized and I can't do that solo!
o Electricity shows up in incongruous ways. As they battle one of the bad guy flying creatures, they wrap up its cable in an old electric fan that they manage to turn on.
And now my quick fix: It is revealed late in the movie that the bad guy robot is swallowing up the little android good guys, and that the android good guys are each a piece of the creating scientist's soul. OK, so how about for a different ending: the little guys have a leap of faith and let the bad robot swallow them, and when they are swallowed, they merge with the bad robot, and it now has a soul so it becomes a good robot! With the little people inside it offering a guiding light, it now works at creating a wonderful world... not hard to do since are no people left on the planet to sully it up, but that's a small detail.
So, I rank this movie as a nice try. It visually a lot of fun to watch, but the story is so tiresomely predictable that much of the wonder is sucked out.
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