The phrase "Tim Burton's protege" will either fill you with joy or bilious rage depending upon your attitude toward Hollywood's pre-eminent purveyor of pop-gothic sensibilities. There are few more virulently divisive directors working in mainstream cinema right now, so whichever side you fall on, it's the sort of statement that will probably shape your opinion of a film before a single second of celluloid has flickered across the screen. Nonetheless "Tim Burton's protege" was pretty much the extent of the context I received before attending a screening of Shane Acker’s debut film, the thoroughly un-Googleable
9, and in many ways its a phrase that accounts for much of what is both good and bad about the film. Also, I'm dishing it out now so you can make an educated decision as to whether you want to proceed with the review or not. You do? Wonderful! Let's go!
9 tells the story of... 9 (Elijah Wood), a six-inch high human shaped burlap sack with personality. 9 awakes in a half-destroyed room in the middle of a Matrix-heritage, post-apocalyptic desert of the real, alone and with no idea where he came from or what has just happened. All he knows is that there's a dead guy on the ground and the sky is an ominous shape of brown. Once outside he quickly stumbles into 2, another surprisingly conversational burlap sack, who shapes up as a promising sort until he is set upon and abducted by a thoroughly terrifying tabby-sized mechanical cat. Fortunately, 9 escapes and manages to discover a building containing 1, 5, 6 and 8 who give him a brief rundown of the horrors that have befallen the world (basically: man creates robot, man creates more robots, man creates robot to create more robots, man-created robot-creating robot decides to get rid of man, much killing, limited amount of sentient burlap sacks and one angry, angry mechanical cat survive). Against 1's wishes, 5 and 9 choose to try and rescue 2, whereupon 9 accidentally awakens the 'man-created, robot-creating robot' and all shit breaks loose. They also discover 3, 4 and 7 along the way. 7 is played by Jennifer Connelly. Even as a javelin-wielding burlap sack she's kinda hot. Cue more adventures, a tad more backstory - turns out each number represents a single element of being human - and a surfeit of beautifully designed action sequences and BAM! You have yourself a movie. Hooray!
The film could quite legitimately be accused of cutting a long story short, because at 79 minutes (and the above only accounts for 20 or so of those minutes) everything happens so rapidly and with so little foreshadowing that it is both hard to get one's bearings and also hard to form any real connection with the events unfolding before you. An inspirational speech gets dropped a quarter of the way in and all you can think is 'who are you and why do I care if you live or die?' It's hard to know exactly why Acker chose such a modest running time, but you get the sense perhaps he realised that, interesting concept as it may be, having each character only represent a single facet of the human psyche does produce a pretty limited palette of human interaction. There's only so far unipolar characterisation can take you... that or the budget ran out sooner than expected.
Given the detail that has gone into actually depicting this story though, I get the feeling that the latter of those could be a legitimate concern. It's quite obvious that the real emphasis in
9 does lie with the visuals, and the design of the film is stunning. Acker's fascination with textures, atmospherics and mechanics drenches every frame, to the point where the story often tends to pale into insignificance behind this effortless blend of steam- and cyberpunk elements. The blasted landscapes are fascinating and unique and avoid the tendency of so many dystopian films to clutter their backdrops with recognisable ruins ("oh look, it's the Statue of Liberty! Now I know where we are! Yikes, Manhattan has seen better days"). The characters are superbly well drawn, all soft edges and dying technologies, and the miniscule scale of the burlap sacks allows for a lot of interesting work when it comes to rigging up the action set-pieces. The villainous constructions of the 'man-created, robot-creating robot' are legitimately unsettling too, jagged exercises in metallic blades, industrial screams and the uncanny ability to always be exactly where they need to be in order to induce maximum panic.
But this tendency toward the horrific also opens up what to my mind seems to be the crisis of identity lying at
9's core. The film revels in the chaos and horror of its grimly drawn future but it still seems convinced of the fact that, as an animated film, it is directed toward children. As a result, you end up with bizarre juxtapositions where episodes of abject terror are immediately contrasted with moments of odd levity, replete with bad jokes that have the entire cast sitting around in stitches. It's like Honey, I Shrunk The Kids lensed through Mad Max's Thunderdome. The film was apparently developed from an impressive student film by Acker himself, and signs of this artificial elongation are thick upon it, whether it be the generalised blandness of the characters, the insufficiently developed plot, the unresolved tension between its adult and child-like elements or the overall sense that, for all its bombast, the film doesn't actually stand for much. But hey, you better believe it looks good.
In the end,
9 struck me as an uneasy movie and one probably open to the criticisms that tend to trail behind Burton himself; namely that its obsession with its own manner of presentation occludes a certain vacuity at the film's heart. And there is no arguing that it really does look amazing; there are stretches of
9 where the design sweeps you up with its exuberance and makes you forget about the broader issues that plague the story. But inevitably and disappointingly these moments have to come to an end, and when the destruction ceases you find yourself left once more with a sequence of separately functioning parts, parts which - like the sacks themselves - have their charm, but who nonetheless struggle to produce a cohesive whole.
But I dunno. I don't like Tim Burton that much, so maybe I was biased from the beginning.
9 opens in cinemas on December 9, 2009.
You can view the 9 movie trailer here on TheVine.