WALL-E

Heartbeep, it’s a love beep

2008

Review: July 4, 2008

Director: Andrew Stanton

Starring: The Pixar Crew

Not needed, but could be an immeasurable help.

THE SETUP:

Lone robot left cleaning up on an abandoned Earth meets another robot and falls in love.

DISCUSSION:

My friends and I went to see this on opening night, where it was completely sold out to an energetic and eager audience, with nary a child in sight. The audience laughed at every little thing, delighted by every little joke [especially the Mac start-up sound], and this added greatly to the enjoyment of the overall movie. I saw it again a few days later with fewer, more sedate people, and it just wasn’t as fun.

After one of the faster and funnier shorts, the movie opens with images from space, finally closing in on Earth. The planet is surrounded by a haze of abandoned satellites. We then move into our city, where skyscrapers share space with piles of garbage as tall or taller. The planet is now a dusty wasteland of broken freeways, abandoned vehicles, empty buildings, and trash, trash, trash. It is, interestingly, another version of the trash-strewn future imagined by Idiotocracy. Through all of this roams WALL-E, this robot whose job is to gather up all the trash, compact it into little cubes, and stack it into those skyscraper-size piles. Apparently he was one of an army of robots like himself, but we are led to believe that he is the last of his kind and simply doesn’t know that if he wanted to, he could just stop.

The first 40 minutes of the movie are largely without dialogue, as WALL-E goes around piling up junk and curiously collecting intriguing items. There are a lot of individually amusing moments; a gag with a spork, one of those ball-and-paddle toys, a fire extinguisher, etc., and they’re all cute, although I think cumulatively there’s too many of them. At night WALL-E retires to a truck, with his trusty cockroach sidekick, where he watches scenes from an old videotape of Hello Dolly, especially one shot of interlocking hands.

Soon a sleek robot shaped like an egg arrives—accompanied by a million more Keystone Kops moments for WALL-E—and eventually she and WALL-E become friends, although it’s clear that he’s much more infatuated with her than she is with him. She’s Eve, by the way. They spend a nice day together, with WALL-E showing her all his interesting objects, until he finally shows her a small plant he found. She scans it, goes nuts, takes it into her belly, and shuts down. This leads to the first of a few sequences in which one robot character is distraught while another robot, that they loved, is completely unresponsive. I thought this was interesting—it seems to be, especially during a later sequence, an Alzheimer’s parable—because this director’s last movie was the marvelous Finding Nemo, which had a number of scenes that seemed to be about one’s parents being on drugs; knocked out, foggy on poison, or otherwise neglectful. Andrew Stanton, what’s going on in your mind?

So we can piece together that Eve was sent to Earth to look for plant life [and one appreciates that the movie doesn't laboriously spell everything out]. The big spaceship arrives to collect her, and a desperate WALL-E clings to the outside. There’s a sweet moment [a friend told me this was one of the many places she cried] when he advises her comatose self to look out the window and wonder at the stars. They arrive on this huge cruise ship where Mankind has taken refuge after having turned to Earth to crap. Yes, this is the exact same idea as Blade Runner, which was telegraphed earlier through talking billboards very much like the hovering billboards in the earlier film.

On this ship, humans are bloated and helpless beings with small, stubby fingers, very much like babies. They float around in little hovering chairs, talking via videoscreens right in front of their face [an obvious cellphone analogue], often to the person right next to them. They get all food from Big Gulp-style cups, and are indoctrinated from birth with consumer messages for massive corporation Buy N’ Large [say it out loud], a chain of Costco-like superstores which has essentially replaced the government—a point made clear when the president of Buy N’ Large appears on a blue podium obviously designed to exactly echo that of the President of the United States. At one point a consumer message comes on telling everyone to wear blue, and everyone switches their suit to blue—a point that will be familiar to anyone who has noticed Gap having ads for, say, Cargo pants, and a month later noticed everyone on the street wearing cargo pants.

Can you believe all this satire? Neither can I. But the story still stays front and center, with lots more physical comedy with the robots. There’s one sequence I particularly liked with a little robot, clearly meant to suggest a very stereotypical Chinese person in a coolie hat, who cleans up. WALL-E notices this, and purposely makes a smudge. The little Chinese robot goes nuts, then WALL-E puts a smudge right on the little robot.

Then there’s this whole deal where Eve and her plant is taken up to the captain of the ship. There’s a good pan across the lineage of ship’s captains, where we can see them getting fatter and fatter. Turns out humans have been gone from Earth for 700 years, and this plant is seen as evidence that Earth is now FINE, totally inhabitable, and mankind is ready to return. There’s a relatively subtle point about how the captain has never seen a book before in his life. Anyway, then lots more adventures and complications with seem hardly worth even going into, you can see them for yourself.

There is a good sequence in which Eve and WALL-E, floating in space, have a lyrical dance, leaving vapor trails behind. Later Eve sees video footage of how devoted WALL-E was to her while she was unresponsive, and this transforms her feelings for him. It was sort of sweet that in this relationship the woman is presented as far more advanced and powerful, but it doesn’t create any problem for anyone, and is actually seen as excellent.

The plot at the end revolves around overriding the ship’s machines, who don’t want to return to Earth. It wasn’t until the revolt that it suddenly occurred to me that the red light at the center of the sentient ships’ wheel was a reference to HAL from 2001. There is also a good visual moment at the end with humans sliding helplessly along a tilted floor, to pile up like massive Gummi Bears as they hit a window.

I will leave the climax for you to discover. One thing I appreciated was that the humans were not all these evil consumers who wants nothing more than the next cheap sensation without regard to using resources, as they often are in other movies, but here were presented as just uninformed and innocent—they don’t know anything but what’s on their viewscreens, and we see one of them admire the stars, and the fact that their spaceship has a pool, once their screen is turned off. But why don’t they turn their screen off? Well, we do literally see infants being indoctrinated with the knowledge of their corporate master AS they learn their ABCs. And really—you wonder why they’re learning their ABCs at all.

This sequence, but especially the opening 40 minutes set on Earth, are somewhat shocking in the bleakness of their vision. Okay—maybe just that we don’t expect this from what will be seen as a children’s movie, but you have a vision of a planet totally used up and ruined by humans, who then head off to go ruin somewhere else. Even the fact of WALL-E’s existence is evidence of a society that makes things and just forgets about them. And then that all of this was set about by a corporation [we see one megastore stretching for miles] that has completely taken over life on Earth, and has actually become the government. This is all, as I said, really quite close to the sci-fi vision of Idiotocracy, in which eventually there just wasn’t enough money to clean up or repair anything [a situation seeming perilously close as we watch the economy tank and read of hyperinflation, civil projects being called off, and food shortages]. In that world, as in this one, everything is covered in trash. There is also a Costco in that movie, with an airplane crashed through the roof that no one has had the money to remove and repair.

What else? The animation is stupefying, as usual, although perhaps not as stunning as Ratatouille, for the simple reason that much of everything here are man-made objects that seem easier to render. But again, the Pixar team continues to amaze in the way they have mastered expressive movement and facial expression, to the point that they can give WALL-E—basically a pair of binoculars on a stick—a full range of completely recognizable emotions and states of mind. My only, microscopic quibble would be that the physical pratfall stuff gets a bit old. Overall, a masterpiece.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

You bet, and while it’s in the theater, too, fool.