Visually, it was really amazing and terrifying, with machines incorporating animal skulls and doll heads chasing the protagonists, and a post-apocalyptic landscape that seemed to imagine what would have happened if the world ended shortly after World War II. I don't know if anyone else got the sense that "the Machine" was this alternate-reality's version of "the Bomb," but that's what I thought every time they showed the blasted landscape.
This feeling of a post-apocalyptic past continued into the design of the characters, a group of little burlap robots, each with a painted number) who wake up as humanity ends. They're pretty old-fashioned, as far as robots go, made of watch parts and zippers and cloth (#6 is made of mattress ticking), and they seem more like Da Vinci-imagined automatons brought to life by some occult magic. Which is kind of true.
The movie is kind of a flawed steampunk maker/DIY fairy tale, in that the creator of the Burlap 9 is also the creator of the evil, humanity-destroying Machine, which is in turn a maker (of other, also evil, machines). Everybody is assembling something, whether it's a hat made of a candle, or a stick with a lightbulb, or a grappling hook made of a bunch of old fishhooks. This was something I actually liked about it, because the images of these little cobbled-together characters cobbling together their own inventions was a really great contrast to the efficient, evil machine, with its flawless assembly and glowing red eye. The last line of dialogue is kind of a testament to the promise of creation, as 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) says that the world is what they make of it.
Unfortunately, the plot doesn't make any sense. It devolves into a bunch of weird, not-exactly explained black magic, another chase with the Machine, and an ending that left me asking what the point was. Are these burlap characters supposed to spend the rest of eternity hanging out, waiting to rust? At least in the short film, 9 went off on his own, bound for something. Or is there more to it, that last line as a comment on the whole movie being about making?
Still, it's hard to end on a hopeful note when all of humanity is wiped out. At least Wall-E
had humans still alive, even if they were enormous, lazy, and stupid, so there was more to go on than a hopeful Elijah Wood Burlap-Bot stating that the desolate world is "whatever we make of it." What is the value of that line when it's already a wasteland?
had humans still alive, even if they were enormous, lazy, and stupid, so there was more to go on than a hopeful Elijah Wood Burlap-Bot stating that the desolate world is "whatever we make of it." What is the value of that line when it's already a wasteland?
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