Review: WALL•E

I'm well aware I'm a bit late on this one; I am but one man with but one paycheck, and have a tendency to fail to see a movie on my own until everyone around me has already seen it. Blah blah, cultural void, blah blah hubris, blah blah spoilers to follow, please feel free to read me or ignore me as you see fit.

It's no secret that I'm kind of an enormous softie. It's not something I really feel the need to change; if I was worried about my masculinity I'd be writing Tom Clancy novels. That said, I want the world, or at least my small segment of it, to institute a new warning for movies: "Do Not See This Film Alone". Subdivision by reason for bringing someone along is perfectly acceptable, in this case I would put it into the category of "Will cause excessive sniffling back of tears".

Now then, WALL•E in less than 100 words: I loved it, and I think that calling it a movie about the environment is an extreme injustice, though that message hit hard enough that I caught myself picking up abandoned recyclables on my walk home. Nor do I think is just a movie about adorable robots. More fascinating to me was the all-too-probable future where machines are smarter than we are, the amazing non-verbal storytelling skills employed by Andrew Stanton and Pixar, and the message about continuing to strive for success no matter how hard it is, and what fascinating things can happen when you let your life get knocked off-course.




***SERIOUSLY, SPOILERS STARTING NOW***
**************************************



Let me first say that this movie was a masterwork of storytelling. I suffer from excessive detachment from most media--I love a good story but it doesn't take too much for me to start wandering off to think about what I want to make for dinner that night. Usually symbolism hits me hard between the eyeballs and I just wind up being pissed off at the ham-fisted narrative, rather than engaged. At the end of WALL•E, though, it was all I could do to not beg out loud for everything to be alright. From the first ten minutes onward I was enthralled, and I never once stopped to reflect that it took a good half the movie for me to hear more than about twenty seconds of human voices. Even after the humans showed up, the most powerful moments in the movie were achieved through purely visual means--the Captain's determination and heroism are entirely displayed through extended shots of his feet, and a meaningful glance in the direction of a globe.

Further, the visuals are stunning. I found myself several times trying to figure out if a scene was computer-animated or actually filmed; and while Iron Man taught me to wait through the credit sequence in case something sublime occurs afterward, WALL•E had the first credit sequence in quite some time that I have simply sat back and enjoyed. The slowly-evolving visual storytelling of the recolonization and re-greening of Earth showed a real storytelling genius at work, and it echoed the reliance on visuals that made the rest of the film so strong.

Now, because I'm a nerd, I have to unpack the rest of this movie. Because I don't think it's just about the environment--that was a topical hat to cap off a much more complicated narrative outfit, which is the simple truth that all the best things in life are bought with the willingness to be brave and try something a little new and a little scary, and that quirks and flaws and little obsessions are the things about a person that we appreciate most. It is a condemnation of becoming too addicted to routine.

Look at the state of affairs throughout the movie. Wall•E is the last vestige of an attempt to clean up our planet after we've allowed it to become overpolluted, a plan which, we learn late in the film, was abandoned when the Wall•E robots started to cease functioning. Humanity, as represented by the CEO of BuyNLarge (a company whose name I could unpack the meaning of for hours), simply gives up at this point, and tells the autopilots of the starliners to "stay the course". Humanity's fate is placed entirely in the hands of machines--machines who, though they are characterized as villains, are simply carrying out their programming, in some cases living out existences which consist wholly of endless repetition. Humanity remains blissful and oblivious, and they fail to learn--as the trash compactor scene shows, all they've done is upgrade to the bigger, more impersonal Wall•A robots, and start ejecting their garbage into the space instead of into the dirt.

But then there's Wall•E. He's still obeying his programming, certainly, compacting trash into cubes; but he's doing it while listening to the soundtrack to Hello, Dolly! and collecting little curiosities that he thinks are visually exciting. Unlike the other robots of his type, he's managed to keep himself in working order by continuing to replace his parts rather than giving up (a move which, when it is mimicked by EVE at the end of the film, will save his life). His colorful and amusing existence stands in glaring contrast to the bright, white, clean, and totally mechanized existence onboard the Axiom. It's a symbolic bludgeon that his friend and apparently lifelong companion is a cockroach that is tough on a level approaching Herculean, whom he rewards with shelter from the dust-storms and the occasional Twinkie--they're both proof that good things come through working at it, not just staying the course.

In due course, WALL•E makes his way onto the Axiom, and creates havoc; but those little jolts to routine are precisely what the Axiom's population needs to actually experience life. The characters of John and Mary are one of the more obvious examples, but really, every triumph any protagonist has is in some way inspired by WALL•E's willingness to go a little outside the norm. The primary conflict of the film is inspired by WALL•E taking a break from his mindless routine to rescue a plant; every solution to every conflict in the film is involves doing something strange and unexpected with one's self or surroundings (the Captain's final battle with AUTO is a smorgasbord of creative thinking besting rote dedication); the happiest moments occur in wholly unorthodox situations (it's no coincidence that John and Mary's scene in the pool requires rebelling against robotic authority, and visually resembles two huge babies discovering the joy of water for the first time); and in the end, it is mimicking WALL•E's quirks and ingenuity that allows EVE to save his life.

I have to admit that the life the humans wind up living must be incredibly tough (and I can't help but imagine that the first generation or three of recolonizers is going to have a hellish time of it). But I think that, hard as it will be, the looks of pleasure on the quasi-mythological drawings in the credit sequence sum up the reward to be gained through hardship. As the captain puts it, "I don't want to survive. I want to live!" WALL•E isn't just a movie about the environment, or just a movie about adorable robots--WALL•E is a movie about the great things that one can do, if one is willing to step off the beaten path and endure the possibility, even just for a second, of being a freak. The look on MO's face when he slips off the preordained track to pursue WALL•E says it all--there is satisfaction, real success, and joy to be had in stepping out of your normal bounds.



********************
****END SPOILERS****