Squander Or Masterpiece?

In Movies on 16 January 2010 with No Comments

Thanks to the Netflix subscription gifted me a month or two back, tonight I finally watched Shane Acker’s 9, and while it’s one of the most visually beautiful films I’ve seen (ragpunk?), I mainly wondered why the story didn’t appear to make any actual sense.

Central to the story is the mysterious talisman, which as near as I can tell serves only two purposes: to wake the machine and grant it the power literally to suck the souls out of the dolls, and to release those souls up to some heavenly hereafter should the correct sequence of buttons be pressed.

Which is all well and good until you really take a look at it, since the second purpose is necessary only if someone is stupid enough to allow the talisman to fulfill the first. And “wake the machine and grant it the power literally to suck the souls out of the dolls” seems a fairly daft thing for anyone to want, so the inescapably problematic question is: why does the talisman exist anymore in the first place?

For that matter, even if it exists, why would the scientist specifically set out to create a race of dolls, each possessed of a portion of his own soul, and then leave behind for the ninth and final doll a device whose first purpose — the resurrection of the machine responsible for destroying humanity — is horrifyingly counterproductive?

I could come up with only one answer: the scientist saw this as his only means of spiritual escape and redemption for the role he played in creating the machines which ended all human life in the first place. But what that means was he was willing to create life in order for that life to die so that the pieces of his soul would be released unto heaven.

What that explanation in turn means, ultimately, is that the scientist suffered from a rather terrifyingly selfish and manipulative sense of his own spiritual needs. One that, no less, would seem to undermine that suggestion that he’s even deserving of any sort of redemption. If so, the story certainly then makes sense, but turns out to be not only almost rampagingly cynical, but almost completely deceptive about being so.

Humanity, the film would then be saying, not only would destroy itself through the creation of and self-interested manipulation of machines, but would then respond to doing so by extending that self-interest and manipulation into the creation of new life whose sole purpose is to be left behind and die in order to set free the soul of the destroyer.

“We had such potential,” the scientist says. “Such promise. But we squandered our gifts.” I’m left to wonder whether this also describes 9 itself, or whether Acker is a mad genius who smuggled into the nation’s movie theaters a near masterpiece of human misanthropy.