Review: ‘WALL-E’

A heartfelt G-rated scifi with plenty of imagination (and human condition) to go around.

Seven hundred years after a garbage-strewn Earth drives the human population into space, the job still isn’t done, and only one robot named WALL-E (voice of Ben Burtt) is still working to clean up the mess. Over time, WALL-E has developed both a personality and a case of loneliness, but hope arrives in the form of a robotic probe named EVE (voice of Elissa Knight). When EVE finds what she’s looking for and returns to space, WALL-E decides he must follow her wherever she goes… even if she doesn’t or can’t yet feel the same way for him.

It’s the same old story: robot meets robot, robot loses robot, robot gets robot back. Of course, these things don’t have noses or even mouths, and it’s probably closer to reality to call them “Mac” (EVE) and “PC” (WALL-E). Lessons of “You can’t help who you fall in love with” aside (and with only this one mention of pro same-sex subtext), does anyone else feel weird that viewers and reviewers alike keep assigning these things gender as if we expect eventual procreation? Whatever the viewers level of experience in matters of the heart, Disney’s Pixar has made it easy to identify with the human longing to share life with that special someone (or anyone, for that matter). Then there’s the rest of the film…

When the soulless machines catch up with the remnants of humanity, the humans have each other but no purpose to aspire to, which is the opposite of the robot characters. Call me biased, but the irony of humans blissfully taking personal relationships for granted because their every whim is fulfilled seems more far fetched and far less interesting than the robots’ story. As an allegory for the human condition, the silliness that runs rampant once the film catches up to the current state of humanity hints that even the filmmakers weren’t sure they could sell the suggested seriousness of this implication. Forget trashing the planet; what will happen to humanity when humans stop acting humane toward one another? In seven hundred years, no one became curious, ambitious, or inventive?

It would be easy to nitpick the production design (EVE’s tech seemingly being higher than WALL-E although both were supposedly developed within five years of one another) or the time line of events (the WALL-E robots on Earth run out of spare parts to repair themselves but the human-populated star crusiers have on-board resources for 700 years), but it feels like for every plot revelation reinforcing the predicament of WALL-E, the story moves farther from him/it as a strong central character. One option might have been not to bring the humans into the story at all, allowing the robots to inherit the Earth and leaving humanity to become the stuff of legends. The end credits suggest how that story could have played out, but the overall idea of both humans and machines aspiring to be human by seeking personal fulfillment is nevertheless a positive one (not to mention simply amazing to watch).

(a three skull recommendation out of four)
3outof4-MovieCrypt-review-grmdrpr

2 comments

>the WALL?·E robots on Earth run out of spare parts to
>repair themselves but the human-populated starcrusiers
>have on-board resources for 700 years

We see broken down Wall-E robots that still have functional parts (such as the one the protagonist stole the treads from), and Wall-E has on his trailer a ton of spare parts which he presumably collected. The movie has been promoted with “What if mankind were to leave the Earth and someone forgot to turn the last robot off?”; taking that line literally, humans gave up on cleaning up the planet (as seen in the message from the President) and shut the Wall-E robots off… but for some reason, the protagonist was left powered up. Faulty switch, who knows. So the first part of that quote (that the robots ran out of spare parts) does not seem true.

As for the second part (resources aboard the Axiom), we see that probes such as Eve are launched periodically in giant spaceships. Why do they need such big ships? Maybe they’re gathering resources to bring back to the ship. Water, for one; add some electrolysis and you get the oxygen that people breathe. While the only plant we see is the one Wall-E finds, it’s entirely possible that on the Axiom there are hydrophonic farms being tended to by the robots, and it just there was no reason to show them.

And in the end… you have to suspend disbelief for a while. You are watching a film about sentient robots; shutting down the nitpicking part of your brain shouldn’t be that much of a stretch, especially when the story is that good.

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