Review: I'm not sure what dragged me into the cinema to watch this movie, but few minutes after it started, I wanted to leave the theater. For a while I hoped at least the story will surprise me, but then realized it's a waste of time, there was just nothing there. I stayed only because I had another show after it.

Design: some designs where quite beautiful, mostly of the environment, but the characters were terrible both in terms of animation and design. They look great while still - on posters and screenshots, but not when they have to come to life! They just didn't work, mostly because the very same mistake most 3D companies make: technically it is very hard to create really natural materials in 3D, that would make you feel that the character is alive. You need a lot of effort and knowledge (hence money) to create something that really feels like hair, skin, fabric, etc. Those characters in the movie were made out of "cloth", and that just didn't work! So they had this ugly cold feeling of the computer artificiality, where the cloth stretches or squeezes like a piece of plastic. It just didn't have the feel of a material, that dolls are made of (that's what those characters meant to be). I think it was a big mistake choosing this style for the characters. It just had a feeling of a 3D shoot'n'run computer game. I don't want to go to cinema to have a computer game on my screen, don't know about you...

Animation was also a disgrace. I am a professional animator and was terribly disappointed at the low level of animation in "9". It was stiff, boring, almost lacked any imagination or mood. It was just a little bit above most average 3D animations I saw, and that doesn't add to it any good...

And all that - the bad character design and bad animation could be solved with a good story, right?! That was not the case here. Actually the story was the worst thing in that movie. It was below any level. It starts straight forward, it goes straight forward and it ends the same. There is no twist, no surprise, no good dialogs, even no development. We've heard and saw stories of machines overtaking the humankind thousands of times and "9" is just one of them, and we know how it ends at the very first minute of that movie. The characters don't even have time to get into the story - they are just there, showing themselves almost immediately, and immediately some of them take action without even getting to know what's going on. It just didn't work. There are also many repetitive action sequences, that looked as if they were made to fill in the time for the lack of a story...

Acting, sound and script - oh my gosh, what can I tell, it was pathetic. Bad story has a bad script, and except dialogs like "No, don't do it!" "I will do it!" "But... you cannot do it alone!" "We can do it together!" "But there are rules!" "But we have to save him!" etc etc and so on, and repeating itself all the time, so besides those terribly pathetic dialogs, there were those non stop "Ahh" and "Ohhh" and"Ehh", and "Oooh", and "Whatchout", and "Run!" and "OhOhh!" that were following almost every jump, run, or fall of the characters and it even sounded as if they were out of sync or even unrehearsed.

Conclusion: bad acting, bad animation, bad sound, bad story, bad script, bad characters, everything expected, no surprises, no twist, nothing. Only some good designs are not worth the time. BIG NO!
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