Struggling against survival, 9, a young doll with the number 9 written in its back, that comes to live in the world inhabited only by dolls and machines that hunt them, convinces the dolls that they have to confront their fears and face those machines, in order to know why they attack them, the thing that challenges them.
In movies, our technology is so often the ruin of us. We got that message from Stanley Kubrick way back when, and we get it now. But couldn't filmmakers let something else ruin us for a change? Even the apocalypse needs variety.
Feels unnaturally fleshed out and overthought, dampening the excitement through extensive padding...captivating eye candy, but something of a dramatic spinout.
There's no denying that Acker has a knack for bleak landscapes and an inventive salvage-yard approach to character design, but his narrative skills are less developed.
It's easy to see why Acker's gifts caught the attention of these directors; he's a visual craftsman of no little promise. Now if he can just stitch together a story with the same loving care that went into creating those digital burlap dolls...
This film will surely be remembered as an intriguing failure: a triumph of ambition over ability, of ideas over emotional resonance - just another grim fairy tale for these troubled times.
