I watched the movie “9” tonight. It was pretty, and interesting, and had a fairly stellar cast of actors for the voices. I spent most of the movie holding on to my “suspension of disbelief” only to have my hopes crushed in the last 5 minutes. This is to say that while watching, I thought the actual story was a bit thin. In the end it was incomprehensible. There are so many holes in the plot, it’s making me crazy to think on it.

past the break there will be spoilers…

So, how did the creator/scientist get the talisman away from The Machine? I guess we have to assume there is a pre-story here where either there were 2 talismans, and one was in The Machine, and it was destroyed in order to stop it, or where the scientist got the one away from The Machine and thereby stopped it. In either case I wonder why he then proceeded to create the little creatures 1 thru 9? Maybe because the planet had been nuked and he knew they would survive while he would not. Maybe.

I think the whole thing would have been improved by having The Machine still active, and plucking at the bones of what was left of the world. The scientist was dying, so made his creatures to continue the fight. Instead of it being 9’s stupidity that woke the Machine again. But this here requires a complete rewrite of the whole movie.

I’ve just thought of a new ending that could fix the whole thing. The scientist says that the reason The Machine was a failure was because he gave it his intellect, but it lacked a soul. The nine creatures have his soul. So, as despair mounts, because the Machine is consuming the souls of the creatures, you think there is no hope, but slowly the Machine shows less maliciousness towards the creatures, even though still pursuing them. In the end you learn that soul(s) and intellect needed to be reunited for the purpose of the Machine becoming “whole”, and then being used for good, to begin rebuilding the world, searching for survivors, etc… whatever.

This would most certainly make more sense than the “You can still save them” leading to him having some sort of pseudo funeral ritual where he simply releases the 5 soul parts from the talisman, they float up towards “Heaven”? and then magically it starts to rain. WTF? This is apropos of nothing, and makes no sense whatsoever.

So let’s tally it. By mid-movie we have learned that all nine creatures were actually alive at the beginning of the movie, it’s just that three of them were missing so far as the others were concerned. As a result of 9’s meddling and bumbling, 5 of them are dead at the end. That’s a terrible ending. It makes his release of their 5 souls seem just as random as everything else he’s done. Or there might be something else he could do for them, but he doesn’t already know what, so what the hell, let’s do this. Aaaaaaargggghh!

Not a recommended movie. Maybe for an MST3K night, but that’s about it.