On 9-9-09 I went to go see the movie, "9." I was very excited to see this movie. After watching the trailer, I was ready for this action, adventure, CG movie.
But, for as good as the movie was marketed to be, I felt like something was missing; mainly a story. Now don't get me wrong, there is a story, but what I could see of it was small and not very well contained. 9 follows nine small robots created at the end of the world by a scientist, and they are being chased by evil robots (we know they are evil because they have red eyes). Later, it is revealed that the evil robots were created by mankind and of course, like every robot movie these days, they turn on their creators, killing the human race.
After the movie ended, I failed to see a driving message or real reason for having watched this movie. There was good CG, some cool action sequences, but I think what bothered me the most was the use of the "deus ex machina." The term means "god from the machine" or for our purposes it is the plot device that saves the day to help a character to overcome a seemingly insolvable difficulty. The "deus ex machina" in 9 is a talisman that is of great importance to the robots good and bad. My problem with it is that it is not described at all. It being such a mystical or magical element in a movie about robotics vs. the human spirit just seemed off to me. And then there was the ending which I thought was very strange as well because it was cheesey. I'm not going to say more for lack of spoiling the end, so go watch it yourself.
In the end, this movie left me with more questions than answers and for me that is never a good thing. I like feeling like I have learned something or at least been taken on a journey somewhere. In that respect, 9 failed to deliver. But, as I was leaving the movie theatre I heard people say that they really liked it and that they thought it was a great movie, so you be the judge...
Flick2 Movie Review:
2.5 out of 5 Stars
2.5 out of 5 Stars
9 a counterpoint.
ReplyDeleteI went to see 9 last night as well (with randy no less) and came out of it with a totally different opinion. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I thought that the only major problems were, a fairly cold start, it could have done with more of a prologue to explain the world that we were getting into, and a kind of cheesy while also ambiguous ending. I can understand what the director was doing starting off with so little backstory, since the main character wakes up new to the world without any knowledge either, but I felt that for a while I was just waiting for the next piece of the backstory to be revealed. The action was in short bursts, but that is fine, and it seemed like instead of one main goal that they were looking for, there were a number of smaller missions on the way to finally finding out what the main goal was. This did make the movie seem slightly long, but since I was enjoying it, that was okay. One of the things I do tend to notice and hate in movies is the use of a Deus ex Machina (or as my film production professor called it “the magic button”), however contrary to randy’s view, this movie did not incorporate that. That implies that something appears “out of the blue” that can save the day, and since the item that they did end up using was introduced in the first scene as something that was important and had a special power and was referenced throughout the entire movie, it could not be considered one. It would be like calling The Force in Star Wars, Deus ex Machina since it magically saved the day in the end. All in all, I was thoroughly entertained, I thought the action was good, and I liked that each of the characters had their own very distinct personalities (with very little overlap, which was good, and intentional).
4 out of 5