9

[bloodyrosemccoy]

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 …)

Comments

[pandoras-closet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we saw the similarities to GlaDos too.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Honestly, the Portal ending would have worked better in 9. "This was a triumph ..."

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Everything I've heard about this movie so far seems to be agreeing on the points of "gorgeous visuals" and "characters/plots are from the Giant Book of Fantasy Epic Cliches." Which has me torn about whether or not to see it in theater, as the first suggests yes, and the second suggests netflix.

Maybe once it hits the dollar theaters...

[pandoras-closet.livejournal.com]

There were a couple of times I felt like I was watching a ripoff of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, to be honest.

[mfb.livejournal.com]

oh man I knew the deja vu was coming from somewhere

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Ouch!

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I've heard from a couple of people that, while the visuals are great, they're not the kind of thing that really relies on the big screen. NetFlix is the general recommendation I got for it.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's not even so much a cliche as half a cliche. We all know how the cliche's supposed to end, but they couldn't even bother to get that far.

[mfb.livejournal.com]

Obligatory Female Character.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I noticed that in the previews. I gather that Token Female Character is indeed Token.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Unless one or both of the twins is a girl.

But really, it sort of seems weird that these things would even HAVE sexes. I would have preferred either an all-male or an all-female cast, with an implication that it's just what WE interpret it that way and they're just, y'know, DOLLS.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Or even a mixed voice cast with no implied gender being given (beyond that assumed because of voices) to the dolls. Not everything has to be gendered!




(Okay, unless it's a noun in Spanish, but still.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

I have some fun with gender implications in my stories, too--I have a human who, when thinking in English (as versus non-gendered Galactic Common), assigns random pronouns genders to aliens whose gender she doesn't know, or for whom there is no equivalent human gender.* Mostly it's just convenient for me, but it actually is a Plot Point a couple times.


*I do have a bisexual species with male and female gender roles that correspond less with our own usual provider/nurturer roles and more with--I am not making this up--pirate/ninja.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

...I would say that I wish to subscribe to your newsletter, except I think following your LJ pretty much is subscribing to said newsletter.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Actually...
I don't think they used any gender-specific pronouns, so it could be thought that 7 is just a particularly feminine doll, without any explicit gender.
Also, since [SPOILER ALERT] the dolls are actually the divided soul of the scientist, who is male, it could be argued she represents his feminine side, which is apparently quite small. But I'm probably overthinking it.

[jill-calico.livejournal.com]

it could be argued she represents his feminine side, which is apparently quite small

And also kind of an amazon, so rock on there Mr. Scientist guy, I guess.

But yeah, my girlfriend totally leaned over and sniggered in my ear "One of his parts is a lady~", though I got an overtly feminine vibe from the twins, too.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I did consider that, but I thought the same thing you did--"Okay, but if they're going to go with a feminine side to his soul, it's kinda small--and why the Amazon business?"

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Well, to get overly complicated, the Warrior aspic of the mind has two sides- the masculine and the feminine. 8 is clearly the masculine side, so 7 could be the feminine. However, if I was going to go by that theory, I'd expect to see the counterbalance of the Warrior aspic- the Nurturer aspic, which also has both a masculine and feminine side. 9 could be the masculine Nurturer, but there's no one who could remotely fill the feminine side, so it all falls apart.

[kadharonon.livejournal.com]

While I agree that it was mostly underwhelming, there is one thing that definitely made it worth going to see in the theater.

And that is the sound of GLEE from two rows of assorted Information Science students when 3 and 4 appeared and were said to be "cataloging".

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The twins were pretty cute, I must say. Still stock, but cute. And I loved the flickering eyes when they'd catalog.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

So a Netflixing?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I'd say so.

[tomatocaco.livejournal.com]

Especially 8. I was expecting 8 to be so AWESOME, but all he got was that moment from the trailer and everything else was kinda meh. :C
The whole movie was trailer-spotting, actually.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was disappointed by it too, but in retrospect I had no reason to expect more. It was clear from the previews that there wasn't much to this movie. The whole thing was basically an excuse to tie-in the 9/9/9 anomaly. (I went to see it on the day, which was cool, though I was bummed it wasn't in theater #9 as well. Way to drop the ball, Cinemark)

Throughout the thing, I kept trying to reason out possible ending plot twists that would make it a better movie. "Okay, clearly the Machine will absorb all the dolls except 9, who will finally give himself up in a Heroic Sacrifice, causing the Machine to develop a complete soul, have a My God What Have I Done moment, and commit suicide, leaving the earth barren and clean." But that didn't happen. Instead they went with an ending that was symbolic but made no logical sense (hey guys? How about putting your buddies' souls back in their bodies? Is that too much trouble?).

Ultimately, it was just a kid's action movie with pretty visuals. On the plus side, it's the first kid's movie I've seen with corpses lying wantonly about the place, so that was kind of edgy. Also, there was the overt drug abuse reference.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

No, you are by far not the only one to notice that. In fact, I know of at least one 11 year-old who noticed that, so it can't be that subtle.

[jill-calico.livejournal.com]

"Okay, clearly the Machine will absorb all the dolls except 9, who will finally give himself up in a Heroic Sacrifice, causing the Machine to develop a complete soul, have a My God What Have I Done moment, and commit suicide, leaving the earth barren and clean."

This.

[evilcresyluna.livejournal.com]

Glad to know I wasn't the only one thinking that the whole point was for the Machine to absorb all the souls and become fully "human."

[tomatocaco.livejournal.com]

I was waiting for that and then it never happened. D: Why did the scientist even put the talisman slot in the machine if he didn't intend for it to get a soullll asdfask.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I was thinking along similar lines--it seemed to be building either to consolidation of the soul fragments or to some sort of rescue of the others--and a rescue of the others means that you could have all sorts of other possibilities. Maybe they'd find a cache of talismans the scientist used to store other humans' souls, and would be able to put them into bodies; maybe soul fragments are like starfish and they can break off bits of themselves and thus use the talisman to reproduce; maybe they would all wind up united in the machine and instead of being a destructive force it wouls start to rebuild the planet on the off-chance that some humans may still be around. (C'mon, an oasis-like garden tended FOR humanity by the guilt-ridden destroyer OF humanity would've been COOL.)

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

I liked the visuals, but the story was meh.

One of the commentors over on the IMDB said that the Russian language version was rather different than the English language one. Then again, the commentor was Russian and had not seen the English language version and was basing this on what they'd read. So, who knows.

I'd give it a B.

[sriti.livejournal.com]

What alternate ending would you suggest for WALL*E?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, WALL*E was fine--like I said, it just tended to kinda hit you over the head with the moral. But I liked the ending--especially the credits.

[jill-calico.livejournal.com]

Underwhelming is really the only way to describe it. It wasn't bad, it just...wasn't good.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

"How was it?" "It brought me 80 minutes closer to death."

Of course, now I've got some cool ideas for ways to make it WORK, which may bear fruit in some other project, so perhaps it's not TOTALLY pointless ...

[agenttrojie.livejournal.com]

Haven't seen it yet, but am I the only one who was mildly hurt but the SCIENCE IS OMG TEH EVIL trailer?

Anyone know any neat animated movies where Science Saves the Day? Cos I'd like to see those.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's a standard "Intelligence is no good without a SOOOOOUL!" bit in there, yeah. But at least it's the old story of the well-meaning scientist whose SCIENCE is used for evil (by Nazis!) rather than inherently evil.

Or something.

I will write a memo to my animation-oriented friends to maek some pro-science movies when they get jobs at Pixar.

[agenttrojie.livejournal.com]

Eeexcellent :D

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

I will write a memo to my animation-oriented friends to maek some pro-science movies when they get jobs at Pixar.

Got it. :) *is applying for internships at VFX companies*

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Can't say I'm surprised. The preview bits I saw at WonderCon gave exactly that impression. Pretty visuals, but vapid.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the sad thing is it COULD have been so cool! I've got a lineup of possible ways it could have worked better about halfway up this thread. Any one of those would be a spiffy story.