Kelly Wand“WALL-E” rE-VIEW: E, Robot
July 10th 2008 08:19
WALL-E, the cube with a heart with a cube
Pixar's latest smorgasbord WALL-E starts out as the rich man’s Heartbeeps and ends as the poor man’s Silent Running. For all its lavish, lovely visuals and genuinely ingratiating main character, the spoken dialogue (which it starts off by doing just fine without) and gags seem a bit pedestrian and Dreamworks-y, especially once the plot shifts spaceward. Usually, outer space is where the fun starts. Here the mysteries of the universe are used solely as window dressing to symbolize intellectual sloth and stasis. It was wrong to ever leave the Earth, the movie seems to be saying; please pick up after yourself. Yet if we ever actually had the capacity to shuttle between the stars, our trash problem would be an easy fix. What better landfill than an infinite vacuum?
Before seeing WALL-E, I’d already warily noticed the disproportionate number of American audience members quoted as saying how much they liked that the film had “a message” (which they rarely enunciated), as if that was its best quality. Since every summer blockbuster these days comes with a “message” (so far in ‘08, it’s apparently that “drinking is bad”), praising an animated film for its mere morality sounds a little defensive, the way a lot of reviews for “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Etc.” referred to the “nostalgia” factor as opposed to the intrinsic awesomeness of the movie at hand. WALL-E’s daring message? “Don’t eat so much of that popcorn-in-a-cup you just bought at the concession stand right after a WALL-E-like machine spat out your ticket for WALL-E; oh, and Fred Willard is Big Brother. Oh, and buy these toys!” Overall, I preferred the message of the short film, “Presto,” that preceded it (“feed your pets or they’ll electrocute you repeatedly”).
Far and away WALL-E’s best element is WALL-E himself, a robot with the same triangular treads and childlike telescoped bifocals as “Short Circuit”’s Number 5 but with the unforced geniality of Jimmy Stewart in “Harvey.” Where your first instinct upon seeing Number 5 was to hit it in the face with a bat for twenty-six straight hours, WALL-E is a genuinely soothing presence. He’s harp-music, the Richie Cunningham to R2-D2’s Fonzie by way of the companion cube from “Portal” (on which it’s unlikely time-wise that he could’ve been based). Not that WALL-E wouldn’t have reason to be moody: he’s virtually the last living thing left on an abandoned Earth seven hundred years in the future, his unpaid job to collect junk from the mountains of garbage festooning most of the planet’s surface, compress it into cubes in his belly, then stack these into skyscrapers that resemble 20th-century architecture. He’s at peace with his aloneness, possibly because he’s friends with what might be the last living cockroach and draws gleeful pleasure from the distractions afforded by his many souvenirs (he’s kind of a hoarder): Rubik’s Cubes, lighters, erector sets…He’s especially fond of old musicals on DAT where carbon-based organisms of mismatched genitalia affectionately clasp each others’ fleshy cilia clusters.
One day a rocket falls from the sky and disgorges a mysterious visitor: a sexily spotless white robot with sleek lines and no Adam’s apple, or even a neck. WALL-E tries to engage this charming levitating nymph in conversation but she tries to shoot him.*
Eventually WALL-E’s trembling defenselessness wears down her patrician facade. He learns her name’s E-VAH. He has her over and shows off his prized mementos, most of which she inadvertently breaks. Finally, he shows her a fragile green sapling that he found in an abandoned refrigerator, and she flips out, confiscating it inside her abdomen and going comatose. WALL-E is despondent. Yet even in a vegetative state, she’s still the greatest thing that ever happened to him. He takes her for boat-rides and out into lightning-storms to watch him get electrocuted like the magician in the other movie, but still she fails to respond**. Then her ship returns, sucks her up, and starts to take off again, and WALL-E can’t stand the thought of living without her. He hitches a ride to an even bigger ship called the “Axiom” (i.e., “something that’s taken for granted”; wink!), and complications ensue, in the disappointingly conventional forms of human characters, spoken dialogue, and the demonizing of space colonization.
It’s a bit of a bummer that the remaining hour is entirely set on board this ocean liner populated by the fat-ass Eloi descendants of man. The relentless density of chases set amid shiny metal corridors has an almost narcotizing effect – ironically, the trash-covered earth winds up being more visually memorable as WALL-E ricochets around, trying to reunite with E-VAH by dodging security-robots of various shapes and bleeps. The tale’s main antagonist proves to be a sinister red-eyed captain’s wheel of unclear motivation (because it’ll be out of a job?), a vaguely menacing creature modeled after 2001’s more relatable HAL 9000 inexplicably committed on maintaining the status quo and who seems to be in charge, but then why is it sending out all of these E-VAH drones in the first place (and to where)? It’s suggested that this sinister red-eyed wheel was initially programmed by the confusingly live-action Fred Willard, a corporate CEO who paradoxically seems to have been instrumental in providing humanity with miraculous interstellar technology, even though we’re also led to understand he was greedy and incompetent and solely responsible for Earth’s planetary garbage issues. It seems perplexing that the Axiom is advanced enough to have unlimited hyperdrive capability (which it uses to go nowhere) and supports such a large sedentary human population that wants for naught, yet is somehow incapable of…agriculture? If all it lacks is seedlings, how much good can even one rescued sapling really do? And what have all these people been living off of for so long without vegetable matter? Soylent Green? And from whence come all their fat babies, since the species seems to have been reduced to sexlessness?
The suspenseful climax involves these milquetoast drudges saved mostly by the boring captain, who manages to walk upright across a tilting floor far enough to reach the wheel’s OFF switch (which we hadn’t known existed until that shot). WALL-E’s role by this point has been reduced literally to doorstop.
When the Axiom blinks effortlessly back to Earth, a frantic E-VAH eventually restores a wounded WALL-E to life through the heartwarming power of spare parts. A bit less believably, the human inhabitants of the Axiom are thrilled and amazed to be back on their garbage-covered homeworld, abruptly radiant with curiosity and hope, while the captain lets the pudgiest infants play with the fragile, last surviving sapling in the known universe and assures them that someday they’ll be able to grow cupcake trees from it. Mission accomplished.
Much as I liked WALL-E the droid – I felt far more invested in his fate than the human race’s -- I couldn’t help thinking that had E-VAH failed to revive him at the end and, as it momentarily appears, his lobotomized husk did indeed trample his loyal cockroach buddy to death, the “message” would have been infinitely more poignant. In a tragic, traumatizing Brothers Grimm/1940s Disney kind of way.
But poignancy doesn’t easily fit in a plastic cup.
*Been on that date.
**This date too.
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