- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2008
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Adventure
- Director:
- Best Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- A waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will decide the fate of mankind.
- Themes:
- Alienation
- Guilt
- Loneliness
- White culture
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Dark Star
- ET: The Extraterrestrial
- Hello Dolly
- Inconvenient Truth
- Logan’s Run
- Rollerball
- Silent Running
- Review Format:
- Cinema
Old Hippies Never Die…
Coming-on like an animated version of Al Gore’s overly-tendentious documentary An Inconvenient Truth, WALL-E (pronounced: Wally; meaning: Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth class) delivers a heavyweight technical punch; taking movie CGI further than ever before. However, the story of a cute robot with human feelings is somewhat lacking on the emotional front.
Earth (Gaia) has become an uninhabitable rubbish-dump from which the entire human race has taken a giant, five year, spaceborne moonlight flit. Lonely WALL-E is tasked with collecting human-produced garbage - while humans are away - to compact it all (Goldfinger-like) into more manageable, skyscraper high chunks - ready for the return of humans. But he is the only working model remaining and five years turns into a septuacentennial as people become acclimatised to a life beyond Saturn in a space liner filled with all the necessities of life.
The dystopic vision of an Earth surrounded by a Van Allen belt of debris, along with vast abandoned cityscapes and even vaster desert landscapes, chill the mind in their foreboding of what might come about without proper recycling. The images are even more three-dimensional than computer-generated displays usually are - the eye fooled into believing they are real-world objects, ordinarily filmed. However, some of the humans are real; while those that are not prove computer-animated humans still have some way to go before becoming fully-convincing. These quite brilliant special effects are really what this movie is all about. Yet even these are let down by a film schizophrenically obsessed with the technological gadgetry it deplores - to the obvious detriment of any story concerning Man’s central relationship with Nature.
The only theme that really comes across is that of Man trapped by his inventions into losing His humanity (like the movie itself) - emphasized by the fact that the WALL-E and his girlfriend EVE (Earth Vegetation Evaluator) act more human than do the humans. Indeed, much of the humor here comes from obese humans surrounded by a technology that eliminates the need for manual work. Robots whiz around removing all traces of dirt in this pristine, twenty-ninth century world whose Olympian detachment makes contact with Nature and, indeed, each other, highly problematic. Yet, the behavior of the two, lover robots is largely-conveyed through silent comedy and discordant gunfire - loud and inappropriate aggression solely-designed to keep the audience awake in case it should realize it is being fobbed-off with such poor dramaturgy.
The plentiful visual imagination here does not compensate for the lack of a theme that makes any real sense. The thematic absurdity of humans wasting vast resources leaving Earth when vast resources have already been wasted creating vast waste piles is exacerbated by the oddity of creating a cinematic dystopia about cynical corporations - the kind who make movies like this.
The ecology issue is, therefore, never adequately explored in case the multinational, globalizing and commercial sponsors of such entertainment realize their feeding hands are being bitten. The poverty of imagination also extends to throwbacks to the visual and aural worlds of earlier, better science-fiction movies. Stealing ideas from: ET: The Extraterrestrial (
Ultimately, the film contains no solutions to the ecological problems raised; simply suggesting that all you need is love. A movie that proves that old hippie dreamers did not die out, they just went to work for Disney/Pixar.
Good words.
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