9

Production duo of gothic bore Tim Burton and Russian visionary Timur Bekmambetov must have seen something special in debutant director Shane Acker’s short feature on which this dystopian oddity is based. It’s a shame then that they didn’t tell him that despite running at a refreshingly brief 79 minutes he’d need a competent story to accompany the brilliantly macabre and garishly punkish visuals.

Barely stitching together the tale of a post-apocalyptic race of raggy dolls, all given a numerical moniker from one to our titular protagonist, nine (Elijah Wood), and the final creation of a dying scientist intent on leaving a legacy when the human race ceases to be. Its falls to the newborn nine to guide his group of material mates through a metallic graveyard littered with destructive robots in order to discover the key to their survival.

9 had the potential to be Wall-E rivalling in terms of imagery and themes. Loss, loneliness, and the importance of being are instead jettisoned for a plot with too much urgency and no time to breathe. The narrative follows a very tedious action-to-consequence pattern.

The frustrating thing is that in amongst the repetition are some true flashes of what could have been. The mechanics of the film are truly beautiful as we traverse a desolate landscape that wouldn’t look out of place in Saving Private Ryan; it’s the stuff of nightmares at times. Add to that some wonderfully anthropomorphised mechanical monsters; the medusa inspired attack is frightfully intense and the overwhelming feeling of disappointment is palpable.

The voice work doesn’t help either; Wood is wooden, Reilly is lumbered with reactionary exposition, and Connelly is barely noticeable. Only old stagers Landau and Plumber add some gravitas to the readings. This mixed bag of success is mainly down to the style over content approach to the script, and also a distinctly noticeable lack of humour.

Where 9 excels is in its unique visual technique, Acker’s background with effects house WETA has put him in good stead because the sepia tones from his work on The Lord of the Rings successfully filters through to the canvas of this movie. The set-piece during which an attack is accompanied by “Somewhere over the Rainbow” is the undoubted highpoint, and should be enough to make a wonderful showreel with which Acker can go on to make a more rounded, accomplished movie than this patchwork mis-fire.