Watched the film 9 last night. Perhaps I simply didn’t understand it, but I can’t shake the feeling that I just to ‘get’ the story it was trying to tell. The animation is top notch of course, but what was happening and the characters just didn’t really make sense to me.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Scientist creates ‘Brain’, an intelligent machine capable of creating more machines in it’s own image. The state are currently at war so they take his machine and ‘corrupt’ it to create fighting machines, which inevitably turn rogue and one things leads to another and the entire human race is wiped out. Cut back to our scientist, seeing the end is neigh. He creates these ’9′ puppets into which he pours elements of his own soul through a device he later tells us is going to be the salvation.
I don’t get the puppets and the device and how they are supposed to work. I can suspend disbelief easily enough and let part of a persons soul animate otherwise lifeless material, but later the device sucks back these parts of soul which are used to ‘make it rain’ (more on that in a moment). Would the final outcome have been different had there been different numbers sucked back into the device? The souls taken back were selected at random and 4 of them didn’t do back at all. In addition the device fit into Brain, waking it up and apparently giving it the urge to seek out ‘life’ to suck in using the device. So did the scientist make this device as some sort of salvation, or was it intended for the machine, afterall it fit perfectly?
So in the end what did the device do… well it is activated using a key press sequence, just one, which does two things. First it becomes a weapon destroying Brain, ok. Next it allows the soul parts ‘sucked’ back in to become a kind of ghost form, still in their separate parts. Odd. Then here comes the salvation part(?). The ghostly forms meld together and swirl up into the sky and it starts to rain… The end. Huh? What about the 4 left, one of which then claims that this is their world now. Oh and the rain appears to be crawling with creatures, life. Given the scientists lack of time and resources I can only assume that this life is in actual fact him. He’s just sewn the planet with his own DNA and left 4 tiny puppets in charge until evolution takes its course. Weird, just weird.
Also the element of time didn’t quite make sense either. It is implied at various times that many many years have passed. ’1′ mentions the ‘years’ he has looked after them for example. The world around them is run down, destroyed which could be just how one looks after a decent war. A car sat in the road is obviously rusted and pitted from years of neglect, yet the two bodies we see during the film, the scientist and someone behind the wheel of said car, are in perfect condition. No decay, not a pile of bones, but fully fleshed out corpses.
*SPOILER ALERT OVER*
So all in all, I don’t think I liked it. I watched till the end of coutrse, but I think I was waiting for some crucial element to surface, to click into place and reveal the story, but I must have missed it.
but Amanda Tapping is still all of the lovely. Oh yeah and good plot and story. Been strong since the middle of last season and I’m looking forward to this muchly.