WALL-E review
Access via The Detroit News
If movies like I, Robot taught us to fear artificial intelligence, WALL-E encourages us to embrace it and maybe consider adopting a robot of our own.
Set in a projected future where the earth is overflowing with towers of rubbish and humans have vacated their dying planet for a constant holiday aboard a hyper-capitalist spaceship, Disney Pixar’s WALL-E is a cute animation with an obvious moral.
The main ‘character’ WALL-E, a ‘Waste Allocation Land Lifter – Earth Class’, is a robot designed to clean up the mess made by over-consuming humans. Along the way, he collects things that take his fancy and falls ‘in love’ with Eve, a pure white robot with blue eyes who is very iPod-esque.
When Eve finds signs of life on the devastated planet, the story moves into outer space where the humans have spent so much time reclining in chairs and slurping their food through a straw that they can hardly walk. The constant advertising that swirls around their spaceship is reminiscent of Blade Runner and similarly, the moral is blatant.
While it’s certainly not a bad moral, it is hard to see how the main culprits – obese, over-consuming, planet-polluting, thickshake-slurping, Pixar-movie going Americans – would receive the message. David Stratton thinks “the bitter pill is packaged in such a way that children and adults of all ages should enjoy the lecture” but I can’t help thinking there were a number of people in the audience who either thought a) ‘yeh, those stinking fatties are ruining our world’ or b) ‘what a cute robot, I want one’, as their teeth gnashed at vanilla choc-tops and they slurped at frozen cokes.
And was this film sponsored by Apple? There are subtle references throughout from the abovementioned design of Eve to the sound of a Mac turning on which is used as WALL-E’s boot-up tone.
Despite all this, the Pixar animation was typically gorgeous and with a much better storyline than others of late. It also slightly broke from genre with practically no dialogue for the first half, which was a refreshing change from over-the-top character voices. The romance between the robots was also very touching, despite being a little unbelievable. I have to say, I myself was convinced that after watching the film, even I want a robot like WALL-E… and for some unknown reason, a new iPod.
