Just saw this tonight. I thought it was really… short. Disappointingly so. They really need to take an extra fifteen minutes or so during the first act to establish who these little doll people are, and what they’re about. You’re about three action set-pieces into the film before you know enough about the characters to really care for them one way or the other.
Imagine if, instead, after 9 wakes up, he meets the other stitchpunks and joins their tribe while they’re all together. Take some time to setup the conflicts between the different characters. Establish that there are three dolls that have gone off on their own, and no one knows where they are. Give the others a reason for trusting and following 1. Then have him send 2 off on the suicide mission, sparking 9 and 5 to defy him and run off on the rescue mission. Later, take some time in the second act to slow down the action, and integrate the survivors of the original group with 7 and the twins, and build up the conflict between 7 and 1. This would make the part at the end of the second act, when 7 sides with 1 against 9, and agrees to destroy the machine, more meaningful. This would also give 9 more of a character arc, because now he’s at a genuine low point.
I also didn’t like the whole talisman thing. Having the machine be dormant, and get powered up by 9 doesn’t make a lot of sense. As others have pointed out, how did the scientist get the talisman away from the machine? And when 7 first appears, she says something to 5 about how he and the others had “stopped fighting.” Stopped fighting what? The cat-thing that you just killed without breaking a sweat? It would have made more sense if the machine had been running all along, but with the breakdown of society, had been reduced to making those junk-and-bone robots, instead of the towering killing machines it used during the war. Maybe the talisman allows it to go into high gear, making more dangerous creatures, or animating one of the war-robots, or something, but it should have been an constant, if weakened, threat since the war’s end.
Lastly, I wish they’d ditched that woo about souls, particularly the stitch punk ghosts at the climax, which was pretty cringe-worthy. Have the talisman be the necessary component in creating new stitch punks. This lets the survivors be able to create an actual society, and re-enforces the idea that they’re reclaiming the world for themselves. I get that the green dots in the raindrops was supposed to represent new life returning to the Earth, but it seems unlikely that that life is going to take the form of stitch punks sprouting from the Earth. The dolls aren’t inheriting the world from us if there’s only four of them, and no way for them to make more. They’re just holding on to until whatever sprouts from that rainfall is read to take over.
All in all, I did like the movie. The setting was great, and I loved the design for the various monsters. But the script lacked any real character-driven drama, which is a shame, because it really did have good characters. They just didn’t really have anything to do, except act as vehicles for a series of action scenes. The movie could have been a lot more than that.