Film review - 9

Howdy all!


Last night I went to watch a film entitled "9". This film is based around the end of humankind once the world has been demolished by a war between man and machine. This film is definantly aimed towards a younger audience, yet has a dark underlying feel shrouding the atmosphere.

The story is based around the Character "9", who is one of a small legion of creations that a Scientist developed to help maintain the human race on Earth. Each creature, of whom is named by a number, is animated to life by peices of the Scientists soul.

The number 9 awakens, to find himself somewhat lost. On his search he encounters others of his kind, who all follow the rules of the dominating leader "1". The character of "1" actually turns out to become a feeble, weak, shallow soul who probably reflects the Scientists unconfident, self masking nature. Perhaps the Scientist had a need to "hide" himself in some form or another, away from society, yet still beleive he was right with what he beleived in. Perhaps this reflects his experiments with the human soul?

The story begins with 9 awakening to find himself in a wasteland of what was the world we know of after the aforementioned war between humans and machines. On his search of his newfound world, he encounters another of his kind named "2". The two attempt to communicate with each other, however, 9 has no voice. The constructive abilities of 2 help to peice together a voice box for 9 from using scraps of broken toys and radios in the surrounding area. This probably shows how 2 is created from the Scientists Scientific/Constructive mindset. After this presice moment of self realisation, the two new found counterparts are flung into an action packed epic when a "beast" like machine storms into the scene.



The beast takes 2 away, as a result setting up the motive for the next part of the film. 9 awakes to be being treated by others of his kind, who end up on an epic quest to find their freind 2. This further ends up corrupting the path of the storyline, aiming the motive of the story being hero based to then becoming a dark curious quest about the world the creatures live in.

This film is full of dark, emotional yet still heart warming twists. I found that they managed to capture emotion VERY well within the CG characters, the motion of their bodies to the surrounding enviroments and gestures being some of the best ive seen in such a film. The CG work itself at times, especially with the enviroments is very photo realistic. Once again the one set of characters I feel visually ruin the film would be the humans, even though not shown much they feel the most "Cartoony" of all. The small details on the characters, the lighting, the textures - very well depicted by the artists behind the scenes.

Overall, this film, as childish as its undertone is, it is fit for viewing by all. The storyline, could be somewhat stronger, but I mostly enjoyed how the characters and enviroments were portrayed through the stunning work of the CG artists. Some of the enviroments were very good insperation for my conceptual art project based on Titus Groan. If you enjoy good CG work, go see this film!

Take care fellow bloggers.
Concept art coming soon!
Kwiss