9 (the movie)

DVD cover image, via amazon

I watched “9″ the other night with my son (PG-13, 2009, Shane Acker, Director).  We’re a bit slow, since we don’t spend much on theatre tickets.  This whole post is a major spoiler, so if you want to see the movie without all my impressions first, then please stop reading.  (For the record, these are my own impressions – I had not even known about the movie until my son rented it, and had read nothing about it before writing this.)

My first impression was that it was slightly disturbing, with the main characters being almost scare crow looking rag dolls.  The overall quality of the film’s digital animation, however, is really great.  Most of the intense scenes that involve the good guys being chased by big nasty creatures–and one that is a snake spider evil-chuckie-doll remake-faced machine mix–I would deem quite nasty, and would be too difficult for small children to take.

I was fascinated with this movie, at first, since it involved a scientist who’s creation that he meant for good was turned to evil, and since it brought up Christian themes.  These being a church and church-like structure (the latter used by the evil side), and the existence of “the beast.”  I thought it was going to continue with some-sort of bible-based theme.  But no.  We find that the scientist used what one of the alive rag dolls (the one who is primarily mean and refuses to leave a church) called “dark science.”  Of course, they show it as “magic,” and by the end of the movie we find that this magic isn’t bad, it just is.  The military and people who like machines, and bad people, are the ones who took this scientist’s use of the “dark science” and used it for evil.  All of humanity (and apparently, life) ends up being destroyed, and the alive rag dolls – nine in all – are the only “living” things left.  They are not biological, but are machines themselves (!) that had been animated each by one-ninth of the scientist’s soul.

Once the beast and then his mega brain machine are finally destroyed, five of the rag doll souls are lifted and assimilated into the sky (using a sort-of pentagram).  This causes rain, finally, and the closing scene shows little green things in the rain.  One assumes that somehow these green things are the beginning of new actual life on the planet.  How the impartial soul of one man can mix with thunderheads to make rain that brings life is a very big question!  At any rate, Christianity is shown as an era that ended in catastrophe (although the mean and fearful doll that always hid in church sacrificed himself in the end), and that the “magic” used throughout the movie was always there and always will be.  It is the reality behind all (or so says Acker).