295. 9 (2009)

Starring: Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover

Director: Shane Acker

Running Time: 79 mins

9 is an American film about a living rag doll who awakes to find himself in a post-apocalyptic world, and through working with his friends to defend the world against the terror of the machines, he discovers the key to humanity’s salvation.

I have to say that this film was more artistic than anything else. As something to look at, I thought that this was absolutely great, with fantastic animation, clever-looking characters and robots, as well as what I thought was a very cool rustic, steam-punk sort of a look.

However, as a film, this was perhaps not so great. Probably about 85% of it was pretty dull to watch, the whole story was very predictable and simple, and apart from the ending of the film, which made up for the preceding 60 or so minutes, it was not very exciting to watch at all.

Also, to make things a little worse, it included one of my absolute pet hates: naming characters with numbers. I don’t know what it is about it, but it really makes me cringe, as well as feel that it undermines the personality of the characters, making it much harder for me to relate to them.

Overall, though, I’ll give this a 5.9 because it was quite boring and irritating to watch, despite being very well animated.