This afternoon I was inspired to grab an old burlap sack, stitch some little eyes onto it, fill it with dog shit, light it on fire, and leave it on Shane Acker’s doorstep. I didn’t actually do it, but it would have been an adequate expression of my profound disappointment with his new film, 9.

I’d been wanting to see 9 since I first saw its trailer at Coraline way back in February. It looked fucking awesome, with gritty little steampunk robots running around a post-apocalyptic world devoid of life. Hell, it looked a lot like WALL-E, and WALL-E was brilliant. But imagine if WALL-E had sucked. Imagine if the robots hadn’t acted like robots, and the action hadn’t been well-paced, and they threw in a lot of inane metaphysical bullshit. That’s 9. Oh, it looked as beautiful as promised. The landscape was indeed littered with the tragic remains of an annihilated human race. Corpses were strewn throughout the streets. Cars were tipped over and rusted out. A sunless sky hovered over bomb craters and gutted cityscapes. It looked every bit as brutal as I could have wished. But that’s the only good thing I have to say about the whole bloody thing.

Spoiler alert: I’ll probably do some spoiling in the paragraphs below. But I won’t spoil your fun half as much as Acker spoiled a good idea.

So. It’s World War III (or whatever) and in its zeal, the scary generic future government (probably a corrupted version of the U.S., though the film never gets that specific) builds a supercomputer that can design and build giant battle robots, and the robots eventually turn rogue and destroy all organic life on Earth, including humanity. There are shades of the Terminator series here, and there are also shades of an anti-science stance in the exposition, and both are handled with about as much grace as a T-1000 employed as a dog catcher. As the film opens, a dying scientist has just finished building 9, a rat-sized anthropomorphic robot with high-tech eyes, wood-and-metal steampunk arms, and burlap skin. 9 soon learns that he is the last in a series of similar robots built by the doomed inventor, and gradually encounters his eight mechanical brothers and sisters. Each robot displays a one-dimensional caricature of a personality (one robot craves battle, one craves power, one is a coward, etc.), and each reacts to stimuli with far more emotion and empathy than any real self-respecting robot ever would. They react to corpses with revulsion, to sunshine with awe, to perils with fear, and to death with ceremony. In other words, they react like poorly-written humans, rather than cleverly-designed homunculi.

The dialogue is vile and mostly unnecessary, and the reason is made clear by the film’s origin. Before it became a 90-minute disappointment, 9 was originally a 10-minute short film released in 2005, which is still available for viewing on YouTube. It still contains some of the same elements that annoy me in the long version, though as Varius pointed out to me, in this version they, “don’t fuck it up by talking.”

I don’t want to give away too much of the film’s action. Luckily, there’s not much to give away. You know how, in almost every action/adventure movie you can think of, one of the main characters gets captured at some point in the middle? The rest of the characters always say, “we have to go rescue them!” and, heedless of Spock’s assertion that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, the whole crew hurries off to endanger themselves. Well, this happens in 9, too, only it happens over and over and over again. “Oh no, so-and-so was captured, let’s rescue him! Oh no, such-and-such got captured while we were saving so-and-so, let’s rescue him! Oh no, now whatserface got lost on the such-and-such mission, let’s go back for her!” And so forth. That’s ninety percent of the goddamn movie, though the action does pause briefly so that the robots can dance to a Judy Garland record.

But no amount of repetitive action or clichéd dialogue could have prepared me for the ending. As Jhonen Vasquez said on Thursday,

“If there was one good thing about 9’s ending is it was so stupid it roused me from the impending sleep the rest of the movie brought on.”

Yeah. You want to know how stupid that ending was? Fuck it, I’ll tell you. Souls. The goddamn robots had souls all along. And their souls were saved. The end. To quote the words immediately spoken by my girlfriend as the credits began to roll, “What the fuck?” Does a story about the shabby remnants of a doomed society need a messianic element tacked on at the end? The answer is no. Does a cool science fiction idea need a bunch of metaphysical bullshit glued to its ass like tits on a fish? Again, the answer is a resounding no. Did WALL-E have a soul? No, he fucking didn’t, and we liked him that way.