9 - Not Directed by Tim Burton

Well last night I went to one of the movies I was excited about, 9, and once again fell for the marketing technique of pushing the famous producers name over the relatively less famous directors when hyping the movie. I like Tim Burton's work, well all of it short of Edward Scissorhands so was pretty excited about seeing 9 but it turned out that it was produced my Tim Burton not directed. It was directed by Shane Acker and he's no Tim Burton.

9 is a story about a set of little robots that 1, 2, 3, .... 9 in a post-apocalyptic world that was destroyed by a war between humans and robots ... hmmm that sounds a bit like another franchise. Anyway, the AI responsible for the human/machine war is re-activated by 9 who apparently is an idiot and the little robots need to stop the evil AI robot from absorbing their souls and making more machines to destroy an already destroyed world. You see the AI or evil robot is evil because the inventor gave it his intellect and not his soul. He however, split his soul up among the little robots for some reason that isn't entirely clear to me. I guess souls can make it rain or something. Anyway it was pretty cliche with 1 being a scared poor leader type and 8 being his dumb ass bigger little robot goon and 7 being a ninja like awesome fighting robot who was the only female robot and yet another example Hollywood is trying to make up for decades of cool male characters by making the male characters clumsy wimps or goons and having the female character be the only cool smooth character. Anyway the movie could have worked despite the cliches (it was a PG movie after all) if the evil AI robot actually came off as evil instead it just seemed to be a machine doing what it was meant to do, not evil. Yes they tried to make it seem evil with some flash backs but it didn't work. For a movie like that to be good it must have a cool scary ass villain.

I guess this wasn't the worse move I've seen but it was definitely a let down from what I was hoping. I'd give it maybe 5 stars out of 10 at most.