Spoiler alert

After four months of anticipation (it came out literally a week after I left the US), I finally watched "9" courtesy of my folks' television, which I'm pretty sure is smarter than me.

After four days delay, I am officially pronouncing it the biggest disappointment of 2009.

Yes, there were many movies that sucked last year (and I haven't yet seen "Avatar"), but this one is unique in that it had neither franchise fatigue ("Terminator: Salvation", "Wolverine") nor Oscar kowtowing ("Avatar") to excuse it's suckitude.

Don't get me wrong: the movie was well-shot and beautifully animated. The story just made zero sense:

The humans are dead, the unfortunate result of yet another failed relationship with fascism, this time ending in a robot war. The only things alive on the planet Earth are 9-ish rag dolls and a robotic cat. The robotic cat is hunting down the rag dolls so that it can feed them to its master, the robot brain responsible for killing all of the humans (hereafter referred to as Skynet because, why not?). Skynet eats the rag dolls using a talisman created by the rag dolls' creator (who also created Skynet) which sucks the life force (later revealed as a good old-fashioned soul) out of one being and into another. Initially, the talisman is safely in the hands of rag-doll number 9 (voiced by perennial screw-up Elijah Wood) until, after seeing the robotic cat trying to plug the talisman into Skynet, Elijah Wood decides to emulate his adversary and plug the talisman into Skynet himself (this is the movie's only flirtation with anything resembling truth: "Elijah Wood is a screw up exclamation point exclamation point one oh em jee"). Violence ensues. Eventually, Elijah Wood finds a holographic recording of his creator lamenting the birth of Skynet ("it was a creation of my intellect, but it lacked a human soul") and revealing that, after giving his brain to Skynet, the creator gave his soul to the 9-ish rag dolls. Somehow, Elijah Wood decides this means he can use the talisman to destroy Skynet by liberating all of the souls it has already eaten and, whaddaya know?, it works. Hooray! A new world is now populated by the remaining 4 rag dolls.

Where to begin?

Why do we always assume that the problem with robots is that they don't have souls? One Iraq War, a healthcare debate, and two decades of denying Global Warming later, I'm pretty sure that the problem with humanity isn't that we let our brains get in the way of our souls. It seems more likely that we run into trouble when we let not-our-brains get in the way of our brains. Sorry, Tim: I'm afraid you and I are going to be on opposite sides of the robot war. Guess I'll have to be a conscientious objector.

Also, if the problem with Skynet is that it didn't have a soul, why should it care that Elijah Wood reverse polarizes the talisman and sucks the half-digested souls back out of it? I was totally pumped for Elijah Wood to realize that the creator had made the rag dolls assuming that Skynet would eat them and that, once Skynet had eaten all 9-ish, it would realize that it had a soul and didn't actually want to kill humans any more at which point it would... rebuild the Earth, fly off into space "Childhood's End" style, or maybe just shack up with Buffy. But no, the movie needed one more explosion/hackneyed plot bend.

I guess writing movies is a lot like being president of the galaxy: anyone who can get the job should, under no accounts, be allowed to carry it out.

So sad. So sad.

Maybe "Avatar" won't suck as bad as I think it does.