When you are inevitably dragged to see WALL-E with your kids/girlfriend, don’t order popcorn. Trust me on this. You’ll realize why roughly 40 minutes into the movie and thank me afterward. I’m trying to keep this light on the spoilers, so I won’t say exactly why right now, just that movie popcorn has the ability to make you feel particularly fat and sluggish—even if you don’t order it with butter.
Overall, WALL-E is a movie filled with answers, answers to questions like, “what will humanity look like in 800 years?” and “what would happen if ROB the Robot fell in love with an iPod? To answer those questions entirely here myself would, again, involve quite a large amount of spoilers, but I will say this in regard to the first: don’t order popcorn!
I know I won’t be the first to compare WALL-E to the classic silent films of Charlie Chaplin, and WALL-E himself to Chaplin. The film is built around rampant and infectious physical humor with very little dialogue (compared to other movies made today anyway) and a central character that is a potent mixture or romantic courage and sheer pathetic, adding up to an experience that is engaging from start to finish because of the absolute sympathy the audience feels for poor WALL-E. This is because, well, let’s face it, WALL-E’s life is kind of dismal but, because he’s a robot programmed to pick up trash, he has no idea. He simply bumbles along through his daily business of endless scooping, compacting, and stacking (much like ROB the Robot) the endless trash left in humanity’s wake (much like ROB the Robot), unwittingly discovering, and becoming enamored with, the everyday facets of our current lives. You see, WALL-E is more like a child left alone to play in a deserted city than anything else, which is irresistibly cute as well as gut-wrenchingly sad at the same time. To make matters worse, WALL-E communicates entirely with mixture of clicks, whistles and beeps like R2D2, and is used to a massively strong effect. WALL-E’s predicament is even further compounded by the few shots on earth of him unwittingly rolling past piles of his broken (or for all intents and purposes dead) comrades on his way back to his storage unit where he empties the days findings from his Igloo lunchbox into their perfectly sorted places in his collection, watches Hello Dolly one more time, and powers down for the night.
His choice of movie presents the first problem for both WALL-E and the audience: WALL-E is, like most robots in the future it seems, very interested in the idea of love. His favorite scene, for example, in Hello Dolly is the song wherein two people hold hands at the end, which he is transfixed by, and he records it to, presumably, his internal memory. Watching him attempt to fit his clamp-hands together in mimicry of the movie brings tears to the eye of anyone watching—no exceptions.
When the love interest (the aforementioned iPod) is introduced, it immediately becomes a severe case of star-crossed lovers. EVE and WALL-E hit it off the way most couples do: she becomes marginally amused with him after almost annihilating him with her iLaser; he shows her his collection of stuff; she solves the Rubik’s cube he’s been working on for the past 300 years in two seconds; and finally he shows her Hello Dolly, tentatively attempting to hold her hand before she threatens to blow his head off. Ah young love. They’re so obviously incompatible: he picks up trash while she’s concerned only with her “directive,” he’s a small metal box while she is constructed from the finest white plasteel, and on top of it all he’s clearly a System 4.0 Machine while she runs on OS 327 (Super Cheetah). Still, there’s something about how their audio outputs beep and click out each other’s name that makes you think they have a chance.
The movie shifts when EVE accomplishes her mission and the pair hitch a ride into space and board The Axiom, the ship now housing all of humanity. Now, instead of observing WALL-E in a desolate environment void of humanity, we learn just what exactly happened to humanity. The good news is we’re still there. The bad news is that there’s much more of us, particularly in the midsection.
Another question is answered here too: how will major corporations be making our lives better in the future? Why the same way they always have! By repressing our natural urges with an overly luxurious lifestyle and fear mongering! At least some things never change. It’s kind of like watching Idiocracy the way all the humans float around on their automated chairs, eating meals in slurpee form, and talking to people right next to them with through video feeds on their individual screen while being bombarded by ads around the border. It also seems that the population is disturbingly homogenous. Granted, it’s hard to see clearly because they all wear red uniform jumpsuits, but there is very little visible diversity on the ship. Everyone has an American accent, most everybody is white. No Africans, very few Asians, no one in religious dress. Now this is probably because WALL-E is a movie targeted at an American audience that is about a robot in the future, but it still says something about or culture today whether it’s an intentional portrayal or not. Either way, it doesn’t get in the way of watching and enjoying the movie.
In this environment, it quickly becomes apparent that WALL-E, EVE, and the robots in general are more human than anyone on The Axiom. They flirt, they play, laugh, they cry. They make you feel the greatest heartbreak and the deepest joy. They run on emotion more than anything else, and that is what drives the movie to its climax, an event that is so emotionally satisfying and ultimately uplifting to the audience that it erases entirely the immense depression and anxiety that’s been building inside you since those first desolate scenes.
This is what Pixar is so good at that it makes all of their movies great, this one especially: they mix the cute with the serious in such a way that both come across and the movie never really has to overtly ask for the emotional reaction of the audience. The characters and situations are so authentically portrayed and introduced that you can’t help be authentically invested too. Even the villain, the stereotypical mega conglomerate company that is actively involved in keeping humanity imprisoned on the space station, represented by the forcefully monotone AUTO (or is it OTTO?) Pilot, doesn’t come across as stale and played out. This is because, while it most definitely represents that stereotypical idea, it is also a genuine cartoon villain. Its mechanical insistence becomes funnier and funnier the more you hear the monotone, deep Mac voice drone “Nooooo” over and over again every time WALL-E and EVE foil it. What’s more, you can’t help but genuinely begin to dislike it after seeing what tries to do to the captain, the passengers of the Axiom and worst of all, our precious WALL-E on the spur of the moment. Don’t go into WALL-E expecting your typical straw man, faceless corporation; this one will make you seriously think about destroying your BlackBerry cutting up your Sam’s Club card.
So what is the moral of WALL-E? That an Apple II with treads is more human than humanity, a fact we’ve all suspected at one time or another and yet denied so furiously all the same. That said, WALL-E is the best, most important movie of this year, and possibly of our generation. Not to mention it has a great live performance by Fred Willard! You’d be doing yourself a disservice by missing it.
