Wall-E: Guest commentary

By the fiancee.

First of all, let me say that I did enjoy Wall-E. It was a fun movie. The first third of the movie, focusing on Wall-E’s life on Earth and his initial encounters with EVE, was brilliant and strikingly poignant. If the entire movie had managed to continue that mood, I would have happily listed it among The Incredibles and Ratatouille and both Toy Stories in my higher echelon of Pixar films.

It’s when they leave the planet that the problems start. While my space-geek self was squealing with delight over the beautifully rendered journey from Earth to the Axiom, it was also asking a fair amount of questions: "Wait, how is Wall-E able to hang onto the outside of a spaceship as it’s flying through the atmosphere? How are they flying so close to the sun?" (And later on, as Wall-E and EVE are joyfully soaring around the exterior of the Axiom in another lovely sequence: "How are they flying all around the thrusters and not getting incinerated?") True, it’s been shown that Wall-E is quite durable, as he had a spaceship practically land on top of him and came out none worse for the wear, and true, this is fiction, but there’s no reason for fiction not to obey the laws of physics when there’s no obvious reason to do otherwise.

Then we get to the human race, or at least the subset that’s been living on the Axiom for 700+ years. There has been some controversy as to whether or not the writers were really trying to equate fat with lazy and that all problems will be solved if people just lose weight. That’s an oversimplification of the argument, but you can find more in other posts. I tend to agree with the explanation of humanity as overgrown infants, and also point out that this is probably the portrayal that would be the least scary to children.

At any rate, the Axiom-ites live in a perpetual state of distraction and idleness, quite literally fed what to think and what to do. But hey, all it takes is a couple of cute robots and a tiny plant to shake things up and get them on their way back to Earth, and once they get there, they’re all ready and raring to go in rebuilding human civilization on a still mostly-ruined planet.

It’s not that simple, folks. Rebuilding a ruined planet is incredibly difficult, especially considering the fact that you’ve got no one with the relevant skillsets and everyone is in horrible physical shape. How many people, after the initial thrill wears off (and likely very quickly at that) are going to go back to their lives of leisure aboard the ship? It’s like the inverse of Battlestar Galactica: their lives aboard the ship don’t suck and they’re not in any danger from their robots, so how long will curiosity be able to drive them?

I understand that the film has to stop somewhere, and I did like the usage of Egyptian and other ancient civilization motifs in the ending credits to show that they truly were rebuilding civilization. But the ending, upbeat and positive as it was, left me somewhat unsatisfied. I wanted them to go just a bit further, to explore exactly how humanity’s return to Earth would affect them, to see who stays and who goes back to the ship, to really see the world that they build.

My immediate reasoning for most of the problems I had was that it was a family film and there was only so much they’d be able to show and so much depth they’d be able to reach. However, in that lies the problem. Never before have I had to use "Well, it is a family film" as an excuse for any of Pixar’s movies. They’ve all had some underlying level of sophistication and a simple, fundamental message about things like family or following your dreams or not forgetting where you came from, a message that can strike true no matter what age you are. Wall-E tries, with its "be good to the Earth and think for yourself" messages, but it comes out as being too simple and not as encompassing as the writers probably hoped.

The more I think about Wall-E, the more questions I have. If it was so easy to snap humanity out of its collective ennui, why hadn’t something happened sooner to trigger it? We see babies, toddlers, and adults, but where are the children and teenagers? If they had all this wondrous technology when they were leaving Earth, why make such a half-assed effort at cleaning it up? Has their tech level stalled, or have the robots been making improvements as they went along? If it’s the former, why haven’t things started breaking down?

I appreciate that the film is making me think and garnering so much discussion, but ultimately it doesn’t quite deliver on its promise. Pixar has set the bar for its movies so high that it shouldn’t be entirely surprising that on occasion it falls just a bit short. It’s a good movie with some amazing sequences rather than an amazing movie.