Saw 9, liked it

[dvandom]

I'm not sure where the "the ending came out of nowhere" complaints I've seen come from, though. In the very first scene, the plot device practically waves its metaphorical arms and screams, "Hi, I'm the plot device!" and by mid-movie it's abundantly clear what the nature of the plot device is. And from that point, there's really only two main paths the plot could take, and it did take one of them.


Okay, so it's alchemical in nature, something hinted at in the symbols on it but spelled out pretty explicitly when they find the symbols in one of the books. As soon as it got used to wake up the villain ("The war machine springs to live, opens up one evil eye...") the movie started indicating that the device was a soul-transfer widget.

So, here's the two paths that get laid out by the nature of the widget. One, 9 manages to free the trapped souls and this de-energizes the Machine. Knowing they're ensouled, they then find some way to rebuild the world. Two, 9 realizes that they need to ALL get their souls captured by the Machine, since it was the soullessness of the Machine that caused all the problems. With all nine fragments of their creator's soul united inside the Machine, it would have de-corrupted and turned to the work of rebuilding the world. The movie took path 1, although I can't help but think the creator intended for path 2 and 9 just found an alternate solution.


Anyway, DEFINITELY not for little kids. Lots of nightmare fuel to be had, with corpses integrated into clockwork mecha, and the wiping out of humanity isn't completely left off-screen.

Oh, and I saw the 2D version...my theater's two 3D-capable projectors were still busy with G-Force and Final Destination.

Comments

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

Every time I see an advertisement for 9, I think they've finally made a Little Big Planet movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuoOosTdFiY). Reading today about the Fabricator doesn't help with that view. :)

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was right there, waiting for 9 to throw the others to their "deaths" and then to stand, accepting, as the Machine took him too. I think an appropriate final scene would've been the Machine building machines that were dismantling the Wasteland, tilling the soil, burying the dead, and then dismantling all the machines that it built, possibly ending with itself as new life covers the world.

I liked it, although I found it a bit short. It could've stood to have some further development of the characters, to show what they were and how they differentiated. And why the Scientist felt the need to make nine of them.