Today’s post begins with a fractal called Gears. It seemed kind of tangentially relevant to a review of a movie about a junky robot. (Some fractals make more sense than others for these posts you know) ANYway--on with the review!-
WALL-E is the latest release from Disney-Pixar. Considering how well it did at the box office this week I imagine it’s going to be a pretty big hit too. I just wish it had been a better movie. You have to give Pixar props for putting out a movie where the main character never speaks (unlessw you count the kind of squeaks and squawks like R2D2 makes “speaking”) and you have to give ‘em credit for not having any actual dialog for the first half hour (or so) of the movie. As always, the rendering is spectacular: who knew they could make a symphony of color form every shade of brown and beige on the planet?
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There’s nothing new here, story-wise. WALL-E is the last of his kind, a trash-picker on an Earth long-abandoned by humans. Maybe it’s a glitch or maybe it is just the isolation but WALL-E has developed a personality and a sense of curiosity. He even makes friends with the last cockroach on Earth (who, like everything else in this movie), is cloyingly cute! He has assembled a collection of oddities gleaned from the trash-heaps left by the former residents (including a copy of the movie Hello Dolly). He even communicates his emotions by showing clips from the movie. (For a character who never speaks WALL-E manage to convey a surprising array of emotions with his various noises, tics, shrugs and video clips--all too cute for words. That all ends when a space probe comes to Earth and our hero falls for a cute robot named EVE. Love makes him follow her back home to space where humans have become little more than bloated slugs aboard the star ship AXIOM built by the villainous “Buy and Large” Company. (The single-best thing about this movie for adults is spotting the references to 2001: a Space Odyssey.) WALL-E and EVE team up with crazy robots to wake up the populace of the Axiom, rise up against the robotic tyranny and lead the humans back home.
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Maybe I should take a moment to confess one of the reasons I might not have enjoyed WALL-E as much as I could have: last December I saw a program called Life After People (on either the History Channel or Discovery--I don‘t know which.) This is a realistic speculation of what life on Earth would be like on Earth should people suddenly disappear (and well worth watching if you should ever run across a re-broadcast)… The point of this show was simply that, after 300 years virtually all evidence of humanity would be gone (with a very few exceptions--anything made of plastic). One of WALL-E’s main points is that after 700 years the earth is still covered in trash. In the “real world” this simply wouldn’t happen!
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I watched the movie with a theater-full of families and the kids really seemed to enjoy it. (I’m not so sure about their parents though: most of the conversations I overheard on the way out were the many references to 2001.) To my view, the message of eco-awareness is frankly ham-handed and delivered without an ounce of subtlety. WALL-E movie commits one of the worst sins of movie-making in my book: it’s cutesy (which is ever so much more obnoxious than just being merely cute). Adults with an ounce of discernment won’t care for it but kids will love it. If you have a child old enough to take to the movies s/he will surely enjoy WALL-E (and the parents won‘t be completely bored).
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FINAL GRADE: C
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