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Movie review: ‘Wall-E’
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
As far as product tie-ins, I can’t see a plushy that really works, based on the adorable mechanized hero of Disney/Pixar’s fabulous new film, “Wall-E;” but it could make a pretty nifty lunch box.
Seriously, the kids will want this little solar-powered, Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class robot-that-could in any size, shape or form they can get.
An idea (“what if mankind had to leave Earth and somebody forgot to turn off the last robot?”), gestating for about 14 years in the mind of writer/director, Andrew Stanton, finally sees the animated light of brown and dusty day in the setting of poisoned and trashed Earth, 700 years in the future.
From that 1994 story-pitch brainstorming lunch, Stanton brilliantly spun the idea of a Robinson Crusoe-type machine whose isolation has remarkably turned it into “the most human thing left in the universe.”
Wall-E roams the littered landscape of a city he was programmed to “dig out” centuries ago. Its inhabitants are off beyond the Milky Way on a huge cruise spaceship called the AXIOM; where they have been pampered by their fully-automated crew into blobs of indulged and incapacitated jello, zooming from level to level on their flying deck chairs.
Instead of whistling while it works, Wall-E hums and beeps along to the tunes of the movie musical, “Hello Dolly;” broadcasting from a crinkled fragment of videocassette tape. Especially impacting his circuit board is the tune, “It Only Takes a Moment;” where the exultation of human love comes down to the simple gesture of two hands clasped.
Wall-E wants someone(thing) to hold hands with. His vast and varied collection of human artifacts in his transporter home—from Rubik’s Cube (unsolved) to an empty diamond ring box (he tossed the ring)—is not enough. Wall-E wants more than the work of topping off his latest ziggurat made up of thousands of cubes of compacted litter. He wants more than the sun to re-charge him.
He wants EVE, a sleek Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator probe-droid, released by a search ship from the AXIOM. Scanning the bleak, throw-away landscape for signs of plant life, EVE doesn’t pick up on WALL-E at first. But, once she does, she has a devoted suitor who is willing to go to the ends of the galaxy for her.
Returning to the AXIOM, where she’s tested “positive” for exposure to chlorophyll, EVE triggers “operation re-colonize;” while WALL-E, who hitched a ride on the search ship, sparks a rogue robot revolt and inspires AXIOM’s captain to realize he wants “to live, not just survive.”
Stanton’s story taps into so many powerful icons of present-day anxieties and hopes for the future of technology and of humans. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, WALL-E leaves a drab, devastated world searching for what makes human life worth living and learns in the colorful, off-course world of AXIOM that there’s no place like home.
You’ll never fall faster and harder for any movie character than you will for WALL-E. After all, like the song says, “it only takes a moment, to be loved a whole life long.” Rated G.
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