Monsters From 9
Hey, it’s ya [REDACTED], mod Frankie, and for my first post, I thought I’d review a movie which I wish I’d watched much sooner than I did, 9! If you haven’t seen 9, I highly suggest you watch it as soon as you get the chance. It’s about a bunch of grimy magic rat-people dolls called the Stitchpunks fighting evil robots in a war-ravaged post-apocalypse, and if that doesn’t entice you then I’m afraid I can’t help you. This post will contain major spoilers, so if you want to avoid that then get the fuck outta here and watch the movie, ya dingus! Or don’t and just ogle these cool ass monsters, whatever boats your float.
The Cat Beast
We’ll be reviewing these monsters in the order that they appear in the film, so first off we have the Cat Beast! The Cat Beast really does perfectly exemplify the aesthetic of the movie, mixing together organic and inorganic elements to create something more disturbing than the sum of its parts. The part that stands out the most is obviously the cat skull that comprises its head, complete with a super evil glowy red eye in the left socket, and a blinding spotlight in the right, which really kicks the design up a few notches in my opinion.
This official art gives a nice profile view, and you can really see all the bones intermixed. One of my favorite things about it is the way it moves. Its posture and general appearance would suggest that it would be crude and animalistic, but it shows signs of higher intelligence such as picking things up in its claws and carefully inspecting them, and throwing 2 in a cage after capturing him instead of killing him outright, meaning it is capable of much more complex thought than you would expect at first glance, which is really eerie and jarring.
The Fabrication Machine
The main antagonist of the movie, the Fabrication Machine is an enormous robot that was created by the same scientist who created the Stitchpunks. Where our heroic rag dolls were made from fragments of their creator’s soul, the Fabrication Machine was made from the scientist’s intellect alone, meaning it could be easily influenced by outside forces who controlled it. It was made with the purpose to be an instrument of creation, but the only other human character, The Chancellor corrupted it and used it to create war machines that would eventually turn against humanity, wiping out all life on Earth with poisonous gas. I think that it would get along well with GLaDOS.
Design-wise, I LOVE the Fabrication Machine. The iron wrought industrial aesthetic is just so cool, and I’m a sucker for gigantic machinery in general. As a bonus, whenever it gets excited about something, a network of sparks run across its surface! It’s an unnecessary detail, but it elevates the design as well as the expressiveness of the character. The way that it cobbles together all of its creations is also really fun to watch, specifically the scene where it’s making our next creature on the list...
The Winged Beast
After the beheading of its first lil’ abomination, the Machine decided to take to the skies with the aptly named Winged Beast. Equipped with a total of four beady red eyes and a scorpion-like tail tipped with a harpoon gun, this thing is gnarly. Its wings are stitched together tatters of a flag, it uses a fan to propel itself through the air in addition to its wings, and apparently it has human bones incorporated into its body, because we see the Fabrication Machine cutting up the remains of a human skeleton. I can’t identify any on the creature’s design, but we can assume they’re in there somewhere. My favorite part of its design the “beak”, which is made up of at least 10 discreet blades, and opens up like a nightmarish origami fortune teller where all of the predictions read “death”.
THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about, babey!
The Seeker Drones
Next we have possibly my favorite design in the whole movie, the Seeker Drones. The first time we see them, there’s only one and it just brings the Winged Beast’s head back to the factory. The next time we see them, however, there’s dozens of them, and they’re patrolling the skies outside of the factory with spotlights.
We can really get a lovely view of it on this texture call-out sheet. It uses bellows to propel itself, and has a siren attached to it that it can crank with its single talon-like arm. And just look at those adorably googly little eyestalks!!! That’s the part that really makes the design for me. It just gives this goofy charm that you don’t expect from an evil robot and I love it. I love this silly snail-zeppelin.
The Spiderbots
These guys can be seen crawling all over the factory in a couple of scenes. It’s not really clear why they were created, and I really don’t have all that much to say about them. They’re just fairly generic little spider robots, and that’s okay, because they don’t really have to be anything more than that.
The Seamstress
Well, this one wins the contest for “most viscerally disturbing” by a landslide. It is incidentally also the most powerful creation of the Machine by far, capable of paralyzing onlookers with 2’s corpse, which it has attached to the end of its serpentine body like a rattle, tying them up with thread, and then storing them inside its own body. Clearly it was at this point that the Machine decided it was time to quit fucking around.
Here we can really appreciate all the components of this monstrosity. This was the highest resolution image I could find, I swear. Anyway, the cobra-like silhouette is really cool when mixed with six limbs befitting of an insect with a crippling sewing addiction. It’s also bookended nicely by the two most wonderfully ghastly features it possesses.
That bisected doll head complete with spooky red eye is a nice callback to 2’s trinket cart which was comprised of a similarly damaged doll, and is a really neat way to incorporate visual elements that the viewer associates with 2, since this monster’s basis is to take that character and twist him into something horrifying. I thought the Seekers were my favorite at first, but after looking a lot more closely at the Seamstress than I originally planned, I’ve gotta say it’s my favorite just because of how strong it is in both concept and execution.
Conclusion
When I first saw 9, I fell in love with it. The aesthetic, the characters, the worldbuilding, and yes, the monsters, all come together perfectly to create a true masterpiece. I was shocked to see that it has a 7.1/10 on IMDb, a 57% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 60% on Metacritic. If you read through this review and still haven’t watched it, it’s on Netflix as of the writing of this post and I strongly encourage you to do so. Also, I’m calling it now, there’s gonna be a sequel movie or series released on 9/9/19.
