Wall-E summary and review
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
I saw Wall-E this week, along with two other films, Hancock and Wanted. Wall-E, despite me being really uninterested in it, and honestly put-off by the previews, turned out to be probably the best movie I’ve seen this year. It’s a great movie for all ages - it has very limited dialogue, so most of the jokes are visual gags, which everyone can understand. But the story is really exceptional as well.
SPOILERS! You have been warned!
As it turns out, Wall-E is a green movie. There’s been a lot in the air lately about the benefits of being green, and of doing things to save the environment. I’m not sure this movie is a result of that movement, or if the story evolved separately, but it doesn’t really matter.
Basically, Wall-E is a trash compactor robot who spends his days making skyscraper buildings out of the blocks of trash he compacts. There’s no sign of life on earth except for Wall-E and his insect friend. But Wall-E is just a robot, so basically the only sign of life that we see is the insect. Wall-E carries on his programmed trash duties seemingly unaware that his creators, the humans, have long since left the planet some 700+ years ago. But there is some excitement in his day, since he sometimes chances upon interesting pieces of trash: Rubik’s cubes, fire extinguishers, lighters, colored party lights, and even pieces of other Wall-E robots, which turns out to be useful when his parts need replacing!
Wall-E carries on his day-to-day duties until one day when a probe from the human’s cruise ship lands on Earth. The ship sends out a smaller probe called “Eve” to go search for signs of life - organic matter such as plants. At first, Eve is somewhat hostile to Wall-E, to say the least. But after long days of searching Earth for signs of life, Eve gets somewhat depressed. Well, as depressed as is robotically possible, anyhow. Wall-E uses the opportunity to bond with Eve, and brings her back to his place to show her around. Eve finds the plant matter, and being dutiful to her mission directive, grabs the plant and proceeds to shut down in hibernation mode.
At this point in the story I started to really become attached to the two characters. Wall-E seemingly knows Eve’s mission directive, and puts her on the roof of his makeshift house, maybe so she transmits the homing signal better. Wall-E waits for Eve, holding up umbrellas to shield her from the rain (and endures being struck by lightning several times…), watching sunsets with her lifeless form, until one day he gives up and goes back to his normal life of trash compacting.
But then the ship comes back and scoops Eve away - almost leaving behind Wall-E, who manages at the last second to grab ahold of the spacecraft. So begins the real meat of the story, where we discover that the humans have maintained their settlement on a big cruise liner in space - for some 700 years.
Wall-E starts his search for Eve, which brings him through the everyday life of the humans on the space cruiseliner. The ship takes care of all the annoyances of life as we know it today. Robots are there to do the bidding of every human. Need to get to the store? Why bother walking when you can simply buy a floating chair, which takes you from place to place all automatically? There are robots to feed you, to move for you, and even to think for you. The result of humankind 700 years into the future is that we are a race of obese automatons who carry on with our lives with the robots making all the decisions for us.
When Wall-E finally finds Eve, he follows on her pre-programmed route that takes her directly to the captain of the ship to inform him that the Earth is once again capable of sustaining life, and to offer Wall-E’s plant as proof. Through some circumstances, the plant is lost, after which, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, the duo become identified as “rogue robots”, and are subsequently always on the run, while simultaneously on the search for the plant.
When they finally find the plant, it’s presented to the captain, but now it’s clear that the robots of the ship are the ones actually in control. The captain, who is as obese as his crew, has all but fallen into the “automatic” mode of daily life, in which he relies on the robots to even make decisions for him. But he makes a brave move and wrestles control away from the robots. After a long struggle, the plant is finally verified to be proof of sustainability of life on Earth, and the ship speeds ahead back towards Earth. When the obese citizens finally get used to actually moving their feet to walk around, they recolonize Earth. The credits are filled with nice art that depicts the people planting, farming, fishing, etc - all the things we take for granted now. And of course we see Wall-E and Eve as a now inseparable pair who themselves help in recolonizing the planet.
The film delivers a great philosophical message, which is probably why I like it so much. But it’s also a “cute” movie, as my sister says. I really did start to tear up at times. I really got connected to the characters.
The message of the movie is in the end intensely “green”, as I mentioned at the beginning of my review. And it is intensely anti-big-corporation. All through the movie, on the abandoned earth and all around the cruise ship is the ubiquitous “Buy N Large” logo, which - there is no other way to put it - has really enslaved the human population and made them dependent. All through the movie the message is to think for yourself, to not be a robot or a slave. And incidentally, when Wall-E the robot decided to hitch a ride on the space probe that was carrying his dear companion Eve, when he arrived on the cruise ship he was the most human of all the actual humans aboard. He was the only one who broke out of his daily routine to becoming independent of his programming to follow his heart. And by the end of the movie, so too did the humans break out of their daily routines of automation and a lazy lifestyle. It’s then that we realize how great it is to be freethinking, to be physically and mentally independent of technology, and what it means to be human. And as hard as it may be to communicate this message of humanity through a pair of robots, the film easily delivers.
Great movie - go watch it 