After much trial and tribulation, I saw the newest Disney/Pixar movie, WALL·E yesterday.
As far as the environmental/ecological message (which is the first thing that hits you because the movie begins with views of America covered in trash) goes, they opted for pretty not subtle. New York City COVERED IN GIANT MOUNTAINS OF RUBBISH is a somewhat childish way of thinking about environmental impact, but then again so are things like the whole World SUBMERGED IN ONE VAST OCEAN OF MELTED ARCTIC ICE (like a certain other great movie and some other crappy ones). The Earth could’ve been made to be post-apocalyptic in any one of the several other standard ways, so the garbage is probably more crucial for the development of the WALL-E character, to which the film swiftly moves after giving us an eyeful of what the world could look like in the future (actually no. We’re not in danger of having our planet covered in garbage like in the movie, because we probably don’t even have enough mineral resources to produce enough goods such that it could even possibly become trash in the amounts depicted. but okay.)
At the start of the film, WALL-E the is the sole, um, being that’s on the earth apart from his only friend, the post-nuclear-holocaust cockroach (but no nuclear war in this movie). As the name Waste Allocation Load Lifter suggests, WALL-E’s mission is to take garbage, compact it into blocks, then stack those up neatly so that they’re not so nastily strewn about. We later learn that he must’ve been doing this job for 700 years or so by the start of the movie, and indeed he has built several impressive garbage towers, as high as the New York skyscrapers right next to which they were placed (but there’s still plenty left to go). WALL-E is a proletariat of one, with an endless and menial mission for which labors every day (with solar power!); the blocky, grimy appearance (achieved with Pixar black magic) makes a great finish on the industrial working-class image.
The container unit that he spends nights in (I guess he needs to sleep at night because he is solar-powered) is a little museum where he collects lots of little interesting things left over from civilization. I could go on, but let’s not: overall, the film is very character driven. WALL-E, Eve, and other robots are very witty and charming—the people (yes there are people) are not. The surviving humans are those who left on a cruise space ship where robots run everything and do all the work (there’s a human captain but he doesn’t do anything, at least until the plot gets rolling), so the people have become lazy and fat. The robots are much more sophisticated, in that they have many personalities and a complex social order, than the humans that seemingly have no real discernible personalities and are rather like domestic cats, minus everything good about cats.
I guess I won’t give away what comes to pass, because you should consider seeing it soon at your local cinema.
-M.
