9: 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-PTOOF!
Shane Acker, all said and done, sure got one thing right. If you’re going to make an addendum to one of the most beloved artifacts in the pop culture universe and if you don’t want to commit a McG-sized (Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Terminator Salvation) motion picture embarrassment, the guy you take notes from is the one and only Mr. James Cameron. When faced with the daunting task of directing the sequel to Sir Ridley Scott’s canonical classic sci-fi ‘Alien’, Cameron imported the paraphernalia, the characters, the symbols, the mood from Scott’s vision, reinterpreted them with a refreshing bluntness, primed them for pure kick-ass, mainlined the adrenalin and went for a scream. Later he would play the very same cards with ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’. One really wasn’t in a position to complain.
Acker’s ‘9’, adapted into a full length motion picture from his own short film of the same name, begins with the kind of quiet that also pervaded the short. Gentle movements, the sound of archaic machinery and a sense of wonder and melancholy. The beginning montage soon dissolves into the title of the film and we’re taken on a tour of the apocalyptic wasteland, an alternate universe not far from our own where the machines have taken over, rebelled against their creators and reduced the planet to ruins and ash. One would have liked Acker to dwell a bit more and perhaps even more imaginatively on the waste land but hey! this isn’t that movie. Very soon, the terrible cat beast, a mechanical contraption of the most fiendish design is on the prowl and from then on it’s, in true B-move style, bang, bang, crash, crash, metal on metal, run-chase-hide, heightened melodrama, screenplay clichés, action-adventure, a twist in the tale and then all the explosive way to the grand finale. ‘9’, the film is no way ‘9’ the short film and when it tries to allude to it the results are clumsy like something rushed along the assembly line by Asylum Studios to cash in on Wall-E but when it is basking in the glory of automatic fire and serious swashbuckling, it is in the realm of the Cameronian. It may not necessarily be the milk of the soul but… cheap thrills and I’m not talking Jason Statham here, I’m talking ‘The Horror Express’.
While the stitch punks may not really capture the imagination after a while, other than 3 and 4 with their grace and goofiness and eyes flickering like a 16mm projector and 8 who has a glorious Cheech & Chong moment while keeping night guard in a mysterious garden – all they do is have to run around screaming for their lives muttering lines which establish the fact that they are very much meant to be regular clichés, it is the marauding machines of destruction that supply the thrills and the fascination. One is reminded of Michael Chabon’s shout out to the ‘evil kid’ in Toy Story whose gothic contraptions he says are far more imaginative and fascinating than the ‘good kid’ Andy whose mind full-stops at mere role play. The good news is, Shane Acker’s the ‘evil kid’ and he owns up to the devil, the occult and the chaos with a kind of relish that comforts me on the course of his future career when he would have left the ghost of ‘9’ far, far behind. The cat beast in the beginning is terrific but that’s only the start. Later we have the winged menace, a dreadful assembly of evil parts that wrecks all kinds of havoc among the poor screaming stitch punks. And the star of the show, the black widow is none other than ‘The Seamstress’, an accumulation of all your childhood phobias. Imagine a snake, a cockroach, Chucky the homicidal doll and the witch-like woman next door who always gave you the creeps, come together in a diabolic creation of single-minded evil. And then there is the one, the boss, the machine with the brains to calculate and create these other evil mechanicals, the bastard child of HAL and Dr. Otto Octavius. Acker romanticizes it, giving it glorious classic B-movie set pieces to star in- churning out machines in a gothic laboratory, giving chase to the poor and the helpless across a broken bridge and in one of those terrific black and white newsreels, harking clearly back to the Nazi propaganda footage, we see the machine, initially built for peace, trying to fight back against the army as they try to hijack it for more destructive purposes.
There was a sense of whimsy in Acker’s short but as it translates to 80mins, it comes across as full-blown mischief. The twist in the ending is proof enough and it was the kind of twist that would bring out a fiendish grin from ol’ James Whale himself. The short film ended solemn, poetically and it cannot be denied that there was something profound about it. Thankfully, Acker tweaks it for the movie. He tweaks it with pure pulp. That’s the Cameron way.
For die hard fans of the short film, there will be disappointment. There’s no two ways, no second thoughts, no maybes. For those, like yours truly, who don’t mind a cheap bastardization in the pursuit of some full-blooded, fascinating, warped B-movie kick-ass, ‘9’ can sure kick it. But for the kids, those little tykes who deserved to be scared right once in a while in the midst of so much boring, day-glo Disney crap and R.L. Stein, this is essential viewing. This is the stuff that can zap a kid in nice ways and set him onto a better and more productive future.
Shane Acker’s best is yet to come and what is reassuring is he’s on the right side of the dark arts.
Tags: 9, animation, Dimension X, Review, Shane Acker, short films, Space Opera, Steampunk, The Tim Burton Blog Fest 2009
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
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Kundan Shah
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Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
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Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Cut McG some slack… Terminator was so terrible mainly because of Christian Bale.
hey come on man.. McG.. alright.. whatever.. ooookaay
So I got lots to say my man. I was like neck deep in so much film trivia that I couldn’t help being seduced. Me got some different leanings you see. After 15-20 mins into it, it was comfortable terrain. Fundoo film, not always rewarding but yeah….
saara abhi hi bataa doon kya! go cut McG some slack.
Is he on the right side? Amazing execution but nah… was uncomfortable all through…
well.. i didn wanna break it so Dhadaam! but try rooting for them soul thirsty monsters
why 9?
why not 10? or 11?
IS there any significance?
Our desi remake starts with a panditji sooth saying about 9 planets in the same line and the birth of an evil mechanical monster and our dharam paaji inventing a series of cyborg betas to fight it and on the same 9 planet alignment emerges sunny bhaiyya cyborg who saves his brother and planet BTW.
Why only 7 Samurai, why not 14 Samurai to protect a village?
Why should it be the 36th Chamber of Shaolin, why not 37th Chamber?
nice .
why only 5 pandavas?
why only 100 kauravas?
why only 3 moorthis?
why only 4 horsemen?
why only 10 avathars?
Lemme think about all these things…
Thanks for pointing out the stupidity of my question. :-)