Religion is Bad, Science Will Kill You, Put Your Faith in Puppets
by Joel Champagne
Tim Burton’s 9 must be a movie for kids. Not because of the animation, or the simple characters, or the 79-minute length. But because there is a slim chance that a child may not have seen this story dozens of times before — in TV shows, video games, other movies. The very young may not notice the amazingly cliché characters, may not start naming the stock scenes as they appear on screen:
1. Hero wakes up in strange, unfamiliar world
2. Hero finds mentor who will explain the world to him (and to us the audience)
3. Just before Mentor can do this, Mentor gets kidnapped
4. Hero runs off to save Mentor, inadvertently releasing something very bad
5. Hero strives to stop bad thing
6. Hero fails
7 Hero manages through plot twist/revelation to find bad thing’s weak point
8. Hero stops bad thing
9. All is right and wonderful
Add in a dash of the, ever original, “sentient machines turned on us!!” and you’ve got this movie.
As an adult, I was terribly disappointed in 9. From the short, and the trailer, I was incredibly psyched to see Burton’s latest offering. The visuals are astounding from start to finish. The score is magnificent. The monsters made by the machine are terrifyingly creepy, and the puppets themselves are charmingly distinct from each other. The team made a beautiful movie, but they forgot to add the function to their form. They forgot to tell a story.
This movie failed to give me a reason to care. It basically starts with everyone in the world dead, except for some puppets, and it ends with everyone dead, except a few less puppets. In truth, it felt more like a video game than a movie. A video game with the controller unplugged. The characters stumble from boss fight to boss fight, until they reach the end credits. There’s no redemption, there’s no revelation (beyond, “push these buttons to beat the final boss”), and there’s no character arc.
At the end, everything is the same as it was in the beginning. Except now it’s raining.
