Changing Lanes

Being a 10pm show, we left at 9:40pm from home and some how managed to reach Mall of the Emirates by 9:55pm. Being thursday, we weren't sure if we'd get any tickets but suprisingly we did. Maybe everyone was busy watching the Shahid Kapur starrer Paathshala which I've heard is rubbish. Anyway we got there just in time i.e. the movie had started maybe a minute before we entered.

9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) is a rag doll that awakens in a post apocalyptic future scarred by a war between Humans and Machines that has destroyed the world including all of humanity. He finds a small group of rag dolls like him who are constantly threatened by a beast that looks like a mechanical dog. The story revolves around how 9 rescues 2 (voiced by Martin Landau) who he initially meets with the help of 5(voiced by John C. Reilly) and 7(voiced by Jennifer Connelly) while in the process awakens a more fearsome machine called the Brain. The brain is a machine that was created by man to built machines by using it's own superior intelligence. Obviously terminator style, the machines turn on humans and the rest is well history. 9 convinces the others to destroy the Brain instead of hiding and waiting for it to hunt them down. I won't go more in detail cause well you should go watch it.

Coming to what I thought about the movie. Well we've already established that being a Tim Burton movie it had to be different and it was in my opinion but I was expecting more. The story was very vague and character development could have been better but that in my opinion let the audience fill in the gaps with their own imagination which went well cause the movie was from the point of view of the rag dolls who themselves didn't know why they existed and what they had to do. What disappointed me a little was that director Shane Acker was hesitant to push the envelope which shows cause the movie was a mere 80minutes long including the end credits. He could have stunned the audience with a different story line but instead choose to give the movie a bit of soul (literally) which was good but could have been better. What in the end really makes the movie stand out is the spectacular visual display that Shane Acker has created. Never a wasteland has looked so beautiful on the big screen. It was CGI at its best.

All in all it was money well spent (including the salik that is...)