I don’t normally review movies here, but I’ve really had my hand forced here. I saw Wall-E opening night and fell in love. Really, if you’ve not seen it yet, go and check it out. It’s far and away Pixar’s most ambitious and mature movie. Gone are the cute animals of Finding Nemo and Ratatouille, no more bright colors and celebrity voices like Toy Story and Cars. We’re left with, instead, a rather dystopian epic that contains a center of humanity that few other movies have had.
However, all is not well. As soon as the plot arrived, I knew what was coming. The movie centers itself on a planet Earth that has been left a wasteland by humanity, where life is unable to survive. The only evidence that people were on the planet at all is mountains of trash and a swath of signs and electronic display from “Buy n Save” “Buy n Large” (thanks Rodney!),the generic representative of a Wal-Mart conglomerate that took over everything from groceries to gas stations to housing. Humans are now fat and lazy, riding around on little floating chairs in a spaceship until Earth is cleaned up, which is of course Wall-E’s job.
Once I realized where the plot was aimed, I knew the right was going to have a shit fit, and so they did. Just as a random example, the Washington Times railed the movie’s “anti-consumerist” message.
Actually, I’m being unfair. The New York Post adored the movie, getting the point far better than that moron at the Times did. So to say the right as a whole hated it is being ignorant. So I’ll say the blindly moronic “must hate anything vaguely liberal” sect of the right had a shit fit.
The movie is not anti-consumerist, it’s not anti-technology, it’s not radical or preachy. It’s a dystopian future story along the lines of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. We have a dark vision of a world that has seen the humans devoid of our humanity, letting robots “live” for us while we merely float along, eating and sleeping on schedule. The glimmering hope in the movie is Wall-E himself, and it is through him that our species finds itself again.
Any claims that this has anything to do with left vs right are made by people who honestly think “giving a shit about the planet” is a political issue. Maybe you don’t believe in global warming, that’s fine. The film only indirectly references it by the lack of vegetation and animals, never ascribing it to anything specific. The message of the film is one of responsibility, that we must take charge of both ourselves and our world.
And that’s ignoring the entire story of Wall-E and Eve. The above is not the majority of the film, most occurs between two robots. The amount of emotion Pixar managed to put into the interactions of robots incapable of speaking beyond saying their own names is nothing short of mindblowing. I won’t even lie, parts got me rather emotional. All done with nothing but the most basic “expressions” and no dialogue.
So ignore the hysterics claiming this is some preachy message movie. Yes, it’s a movie with a message, but if you think it’s partisan, you’ve got problems yourself. It’s surprisingly dark and heavy for a G-rated Pixar film, and might go down as their crowning achievement. To quote the Post’s review:
Some day, there will be college courses devoted to this movie.
