So my esteemed roommate and I went to see 9 last night, having desired to see it since seeing a trailer in the spring, before Coraline (I think). We rarely go to the movies anymore, because most theatres are pits full of screaming, unattended children, loud talkers, cell phone users and the like, and the movie theatre charges you an arm and a leg for the privilege of ruining whatever it is that they show. However we made an exception for 9 because a: it looked really sweet and b: it was picked up by the high-end independent theatre in town, Sundance Cinemas.

Pity things turned out the way they did.

Sundance is great, and apparently there are only two, one here in Madison and one in California. They have a nice little restaurant (apparently, we have yet to eat there), a cafe, a bar, and a great concessions stand that is more like an indie coffee house than a popcorn and giant-Pepsi vending area. You can order tickets online, in advance, even picking out your seats, which we took advantage of for 9, so you don’t have to show up a half hour early to make sure you can see and sit together. It’s in the Hilldale mall area, which I used to think of as Madison’s version of Carmel, Indiana, namely the ultra yuppie, fake shopping district concept. I’ve since re-evaluated that a bit; there are too many neat stores in this area, not everything is ultra pricey, and there really is a place on the west side of Madison that is just like Carmel, complete with a whole little town-sized outdoor mall full of soulless and overpriced places to spend your excess wealth and wash away your white privilege with mediocre booze.

It’s sad that such a place exists in Madison, though really it’s more like Middleton out there, I suppose. A Cheeseburger in Paradise? Here? Why would anyone ever go there when you have Dotty Dumpling situated downtown, right across the street from a parking garage, which serves utterly fantastic burgers for 7 bucks a piece? It boggles the mind.

I digress though. Sundance is awesome, and we got to the show in plenty of time, picked up our tickets, and got a couple of truly fantastic apple-spice teas for beverages instead of soda. They were like 2 bucks a piece too! I spend four dollars on lousy bottled water when I go to the movies normally.

We got to our seats and there was a group of young teens in the same row who worried me a bit, but they kept it to the occasional whisper during the show, which was ok… and never happens anywhere else. These kids knew that the theater wasn’t just there to entertain them personally, and tried to use their ‘indoor voices’! There was a nifty pre-show thing on the screen where an audience of old timey woodcut people, ala Wondermark, stare back at you and move around in their seats, which is ten times better than the lame trivia and annoying album promotion that seems to be universal in the multiplexes these days. Not one commercial for Mountain Dew, can you believe it?

Honestly, going to Sundance is like being in an alternate reality.

Then the movie started, and the experience went off a cliff.

Don’t get me wrong, the exhibition of the film was fine, the sound and picture were good. Even the kids in the same row were ok. It’s just.. 9 the movie sucks. It sucks so bad.

It’s boring as hell. Visually it’s very pretty, and though you can see flaws in their texture work sometimes, the movie is easily on par with Pixar animation in a technical sense. But there’s no story to speak of, or to be more precise, it’s a story you’ve seen, read, and played, especially played, a hundred times before. 9 is a mishmash of the worst cliches from popular geeky culture, a small, uninteresting plot populated with cardboard cutout characters* going through the motions of a meaningless adventure. There are stupid puzzles, pointless heroics, and no one draws your attention or demonstrates any depth. It lurches from one set-piece to another, one little contained area to the next, and feels, overwhelmingly, palpably like being stuck watching someone else, someone else who isn’t that bright I might add, playing the most mediocre videogame you’ve ever seen. Explore, interact with NPC (non-player character), find out a bit of story, fight scene, move on. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I kept thinking of videogames while I sat through this little piece of purgatory, videogames that I had played, as a child, a young adult, up to the present day, that had done this story, or pieces of it, and done it better, with the added advantage that I could interact with the game and hence felt *involved*. There are recognizable elements of adventure games like Myst, story elements from Mega Man X and Final Fantasy, even a more than telling little piece of Dragonball iconography. The whole thing has been DONE, and feels tired. By the time they tack on an anticlimactic, unsatisfying open-ending (god, please, no sequels), I was more than ready to go, and longing to be back home watching the last bit of Frost/Nixon on DVD.

9 is an awful movie. But at least I got to see the trailer for the new Michael Moore film. Looks pretty sweet.

*This movie breaks bold new ground in the lack of characterization for a movie. It has the first half-dimensional characters I’ve ever seen (a completely one dimensional character split into two people, thus watering them/it down even further.. a character with absolutely no speaking lines, I might add). It even has a 0-dimensional character, someone who is defined as having one special trait that it is then revealed everybody has, rendering them completely superfluous. Meaningless. A dramatic empty set.