Thoughts on the film: 9

I saw 9 yesterday. I'd been wanting to see 9 for ages, and initially planned it as a reward for finishing pages by a certain time, but then I didn't finish the pages so I didn't see 9 until yesterday. I was looking forward to it because I love that post-apocalyptic burlap sack people type story.

Which is why, I suppose, I feel a little let down. It wasn't a bad movie exactly, but just not one to wow me as much as I'd hoped. It all starts with the protagonist.

Here be spoilers.

The story starts as 9 wakes up from creation into a dead world. Does he explore the room he awoke in? Nah. Then he would have found something that would have ended the story a lot faster. But he does go outside and explore the world, where he finds a friend. A mechanical beastie attacks and kidnaps his new friend, named 2, all while 9 cowers like a newborn babe, which I suppose he is.

Okay. He's new in the world. Maybe he doesn't have guts yet.

Then he gets another new friend, 5, and convinces this friend to go with him into the wasteland to find the other friend. They lose their map. They take shelter in a cave - a cave with beastie prints heading into it. 5 doesn't want to go, but follows 9 anyway. In this cave they find and rescue 2 and kill the beastie. Yay! Story over! Oh wait, no. 9, being the retard he is, puts a glowy piece of metal right in the place where the beastie had been attempting to put the glowy piece of metal.

Now I don't know about you, but when a bad guy tries to do something and I defeat him, I do not come along behind him and try to finish his last task. 9, apparently, does. And people die. And if there are nine sentient beings left in the entire world, you should probably try to not get any of them killed.

It turns out that putting that piece of metal in that place awakened a giant death machine that killed all humanity and doesn't feel any better about living sacks of burlap, so now the story is the 8 surviving burlap people have to kill the giant mega beastie that for some reason was shut off even though it was alive years ago when it killed all the people. Maybe its battery was dead. But 9 took care of that by sticking in the green soul battery and bringing the thing back to life.

If our hero had stayed unborn, or maybe had acted with a modicum of sense, nobody would be dead.

So 9 goes back to the survivors, one of whom has been able to keep everybody from dying for years until 9 came along, and 9 tries to convince them to go kill the beastie. He does this by lecturing them on their cowardice.

So let's recap. The guy who got 2 kidnapped and then awoke a giant mega beastie who intends to kill them all is lecturing the others on their desire to stay inside and not go out looking for shit that could kill them. And this is the guy I'm supposed to think of as the hero?

Why the fuck does anyone follow this idiot? He just got here, and already he's fucked pretty much everything up, and other burlap people are just like "Yeah! Let's do what 9 says! Why live as a coward when you can die as a moron!"

And I don't really understand what the metal piece did anyway. It eats souls but then releases souls that somehow kills the beastie but not the souls who somehow make the sky rain when they're released. And it's green.

Come to think of it, maybe this movie IS bad. It was pretty and had some good action sequences and I liked some of the characters, but now that I think about it, the story doesn't make any sense. Stupid people who've been perfectly safe hidden away follow a guy who gets everybody killed, and then use somebody's soul to kill a soulless beast and make rain. That's a hell of a logline.