9

9 was underwhelming. The art direction was fantastic, and the set design and animation were great, but it was mostly a pretty movie without much else going for it. The characters were stock, the pacing was off, and the plot turned into a shaggy dog story.

There was a lot of buildup, but no payoff. Kudos to them for a cool premise and an attempt to do something unexpected with an old story, but I’m afraid it didn’t give me so much a sense of a hopeful beginning as it did a sense that the writers got through the climax and then got bored trying to think of a conclusion and went bowling instead. “We’ll just say it’s deep!” they assured each other over their delicious bowling feast of pizza and fries. “Nobody can argue with that!”

At least the ham-fisted ending to WALL*E looked like the writers had given it half a second's thought.

Which is a damn shame, because, with a little more thought, the elements the writers put in and then didn’t use could have made for a pretty cool story.

(Also, I decided fairly early on that one of the antagonists was GLaDOS, which suggested an interesting alternate ending …)