Why Does EVE Pack Heat?
I went to see WALL•E this past weekend with my five-year-old (nearly six-year-old, as he’ll tell you) son. His comment: “this movie is too sad.” But he still wants to see it again. Mission accomplished from Andrew Stanton’s perspective, I’d say.
Myself, I found it a distinct disappointment. Why?
- There is no character development. WALL•E is who he is from the very beginning. He does not grow or change. EVE changes in as much as she falls in love with WALL•E, and becomes more of a personality, but she doesn’t really learn anything of consequence, and she doesn’t really grow. And the humans obviously undergo some moral growth, but it is (a) purchased very cheaply, and (b) none of them are actual characters. For me, this is a pretty fundamental problem.
- There is almost no plot. Of course, WALL•E is a Noah’s Ark story, and the template doesn’t have much plot. But it’s still a problem. In this case, though, the fix the creators have settled on makes the problem worse, because the plot they have tacked on – the autopilot doesn’t want to let the humans go back – didn’t pack much emotional punch.
- There are huge problems with what there is of a plot. Why has the cruise ship “sailed” so far from Earth, given that it isn’t going anywhere? Where does the cruise ship get new matter to sustain its charges (we see huge amounts of garbage being dumped into space, so we know it is not a closed ecology)? Most seriously why is EVE still being sent to look for vegetation if project recolonize has been cancelled??? This is a huge, massive, gaping plot hole that basically ruined the second half of the movie for me.
- And why does EVE pack heat? Her function is to look for vegetation and, if she finds some, shut down and wait to be picked up. The Earth is uninhabited, so there are no enemies or wildlife to worry about. Why should she be heavily armed? Apart from the obvious need to make her more like Angelina Jolie, I mean. But that’s another way of expressing a problem that pervades the movie: over and over, the creators made choices that were cool over choices that made their created world more persuasive. A minor example: the liberation of the robots from the psych ward. Forget the fact that it doesn’t make any sense to celebrate the release of these malfunctioning machines – why is there a robot psych ward at all? Why aren’t these machines just, you know – turned off?
- Minor complaint, but I really hate it when the science is gratuitously wrong. I don’t mind that EVE appears to have magic powers, including the ability to fly without producing any exhaust. I do mind that the spaceship that brings her to Earth and picks her up uses old-fashioned rockets that somehow don’t damage poor old rust-covered WALL•E. I don’t mind that the Axciom has some kind of magic gravity. I do mind that if you tilt the ship (relative to what?) everything slides to one side. I am willing to buy into the rules of your world – but I want your world to have rules.
WALL•E is being compared to the best of the Pixar films, but I actually think it’s most comparable to Cars, another film with a poorly thought-out alternate world and a very simple plot (albeit with a whole lot more character development than WALL•E has).
Now, all of the above having been said, I enjoyed myself, and I thought there were wonderful things in the movie. The first half-hour – alone with WALL•E and his pet cockroach – was beautiful and amusing; the second half-hour – the wooing and then the caretaking of EVE – was even more affecting. If the movie had continued in this vein, my complaints would be fewer and less-serious. But I really felt like it went off the rails once we got to the Axciom.
Finally, I wonder about what WALL•E – and hence WALL•E – is trying to teach us. Specifically, I wonder whether the creators of the movie have really connected the virtues of their hero with the moral we’re supposed to take away. WALL•E, after all, is a garbage-robot who becomes a junkman. His job is to dispose of the detritus of our civilization; instead, he comes to cherish it and make something beautiful out of it. But the movie never connects this central aspect of WALL•E’s personality with his mission to humanity (or, for that matter, with his mission to the other robots). WALL•E finds the plant, but that’s basically an accident. He wakes a couple of humans out of their stupor, but that doesn’t take much – just a hello, really – and that, again, is not clearly connected to his junk-collecting. Humanity, apparently, has been sending out fleets of robots to look for vegetation. Why does it take WALL•E to bring us home? What has he learned that we need to learn from him?
Miklos Haraszti, in his book, A Worker in a Worker’s State, concludes that the key experience that lifts the workers he has labored alongside out of their alienation from their own labor is the experience of making “homers” – bits of machinery or mechanical sculpture that may be more or less useful, or entirely useless, but whose creation is the only pure expression of the worker’s involvement with either the materials or the industrial processes that constitute their daily work environment. When I read it, I was inclined to think that Haraszti’s point was both true and not so true as he thought – that is to say: you can’t build a civilization out of “homers,” but perhaps “homers” are an unappreciated key component of industrial civilization. In any event, WALL•E’s actual activity, what gives him joy, is making (or finding) “homers” out of garbage. But it’s just not clear to me that the brave new world the humans and robots are going to build together upon their return to Earth derives any lessons in particular from what WALL•E actually does – the “outro” shows humans and robots planting seeds and restoring the earth, and is implicitly against industrialism as such (yet somehow still pro-robot). But it doesn’t show an increased affection for the peculiar, the quirky, or for what would appear to be garbage. WALL•E gets a lot of emotional mileage out of our already-ingrained preference for the used over the new, the lived-in over the untouched, the dirty universe of Star Wars’ rebels over the antiseptic Death Star. But the world the humans are going to rebuild, at least as represented in the “outro,” is really just as clean and stylistically pure as the world of the Axciom.
This is a pretty big missed opportunity, it seems to me. I may be grading WALL•E too hard, measuring it by the apparent scale of its ambitions rather than rating it against other kiddie flicks of the season, but that’s what higher ambitions will get you: more serious critical attention. And WALL•E, while it has wonderful things about it – just for having brought back the silent movie, it deserves high praise – just didn’t impress me as the work of art it’s being praised as. I could see (and have seen) Toy Story dozens of times. I’m not sure I could see WALL•E more than once or twice. And that’s the real test, isn’t it?
the “outro” shows humans and robots planting seeds and restoring the earth, and is implicitly against industrialism as such (yet somehow still pro-robot). But it doesn’t show an increased affection for the peculiar, the quirky, or for what would appear to be garbage.
I don’t know. Think about Wall-E’s psych ward menagerie assembled outside of his garbage truck home at the end. And remember that large brooding robot hen pecking at a keyboard with two fingers that Wall-E teaches to wave? I remember being struck with delight when it showed up briefly in the outro, planting seeds.
But then, I don’t think I’ve seen any movie dozens of times.
— Trevor · Jul 7, 04:12 PM · #
Trevor: you obviously don’t have a five-year-old.
— Noah Millman · Jul 7, 04:17 PM · #
Quoting MZS, these are the kind of complaints you make only if you didn’t like the movie.
Might as well ask why Glenn Reynolds packs heat when his function is to teach law students and say “indeed.”
— JA · Jul 7, 04:25 PM · #
I didn’t know Glenn Reynolds was a robot. Though, now that you mention it . . .
— Noah Millman · Jul 7, 04:27 PM · #
Wow, that was fast.
With Wall-E, I’m on the other side, making justifications. Maybe her gun is not for offense, but for demolition; maybe it’s the most efficient way to get through an obstacle in her search for flora. And maybe obstacle is broadly defined in her programming, or maybe she learned to use the gun for novel purposes.
And maybe she flies by manipulating the renormalized gravitational field of the universe. She wants to go up, so she blocks the gravitons pulling her down, etc. Maybe this explains why the gravity on the ship remains “locked-in” to one direction: the ship rolls over, but the “gravitor” is still pulling gravitons from the same source (or, alternatively, blocking them from everywhere else).
And what about Wall-E? Yes, it was chance that found the plant, but it was love that gave it to Eve. Thereafter, it was the persistence of love that led Wall-E to save the plant over and over — sometimes by chance (garbage chute), sometimes by deliberate effort. It was Wall-E’s humanity that saved the humans.
— JA · Jul 7, 04:42 PM · #
JA:
I don’t want to overstate my criticism. I liked the movie. I was just expecting something more than I felt I got. I had expectations that weren’t met, but I still liked it.
And I get it that WALL•E loves EVE, loves the plant, is friendly to everybody, makes direct human connections (even to psychotic robots), etc. At that level of generality, sure. But people have been making pretty extraordinary claims for what this movie is communicating – and it just didn’t communicate that to me.
And I’m not bothered by EVE being able to fly, or by artificial gravity or hyperdrive, or any other sci-fi magic. I just want some modicum of consistency in the rules. And “tilt the spaceship and everything rolls to one side” is just plain idiotic. It’s an instance of “this would be a cool scene to have, so let’s do it” even though it undermines the plausibility of the world. Kind of like when they had little car-shaped flies buzzing about in Cars – all it made you do is think, “wait a second” and take you out of the world they had created.
As for EVE packing heat to dig – not buying it. I know why they gave EVE a big weapon. Because that makes her sexy. Guys – especially nerdy guys – dig that kind of thing. And they cared more about that than about whether it made sense for the character.
— Noah Millman · Jul 7, 04:55 PM · #
BTW, anybody know why bullets aren’t working correctly? I see them in the preview of the post, but not in the post.
— Noah Millman · Jul 7, 04:56 PM · #
why is EVE still being sent to look for vegetation if project recolonize has been cancelled???
I assumed that, like WALL•E himself, she continues doing what she has been programmed to do (“directive”) after that activity has become pointless. On a ship the size and complexity of the Axiom, there’s probably a lot of pre-programmed unnecessary activity going on.
Why aren’t these machines just, you know – turned off?
Aren’t they just going to be repaired and returned to service? (Was that a trick question?)
But the movie never connects this central aspect of WALL•E’s personality with his mission to humanity (or, for that matter, with his mission to the other robots).
Does he have “a mission to humanity” or a “mission to the other robots”? I thought he was simply pursuing his beloved, and that all those wonderful things happened accidentally, according to the sublime serendipity that is so common in comedy. Think of Borachio in Much Ado: “What your wisdoms [read: technological power] could not discover, these shallow fools [read: mere robots] have brought to light.” When you say that the saving of humanity is “basically an accident,” I think that’s a feature not a bug — a feature intrinsic to some of the dominant forms of comedy.
I think the fact that there’s not much to WALL•E — that his “personality” is so limited and unchanging — is the key to his charm. He begins with two dominant traits — curiosity and loneliness — and adds one more: faithful love. Anything more complex than that would, I think, be dangerous to our willing suspension of disbelief.
Agreed about the gravity thing though: I thought the people all sliding along the deck was a bad move in such a crucial scene.
— Alan Jacobs · Jul 7, 05:06 PM · #
Also, Noah, the bullet points show up in Google Reader as well. Very odd.
— Alan Jacobs · Jul 7, 05:16 PM · #
Alan:
Re: EVE: that would make sense if she were just wandering about the Earth, but she’s sent on a huge spaceship with multiple other EVEs, and the captain seems to be aware that none have ever come back with a live plant. It just doesn’t make any sense, and there are any number of ways they could have fixed it to make more sense – have her be the only EVE instead of one of many, for example, and have this be her first return to the ship – but they didn’t fix it. I can see the seams where they sewed bits of plot together, and that’s a flaw.
Re: psycho-robots: they can’t fix them while they are off? If I recall correctly, EVE is brought down to the repair ward in shut-off mode. But this is a minor complaint; JA is right that if I didn’t feel there was a pattern much of this wouldn’t bother me.
And I think I’m going to agree with you about your largest point. I think by the end the movie had curdled a bit for me, and so I was reaching for a bigger-picture criticism that may not stand up to scrutiny.
I’m not budging on EVE’s sidearm, though.
— Noah Millman · Jul 7, 05:17 PM · #
Bullet points were removed by the designer. They appear if you view the site’s code in another style, like an RSS reader or the preview.
— Matt Frost · Jul 7, 05:28 PM · #
I have no excuse for the shifting deck scene. (I mean sure, you can hypothesize an external gravity generator that is separate from the ship itself — the simplest assumption would be that the ship doesn’t have artificial gravity at all, but just hyperjumps from one gravity well to another, although that wouldn’t explain why EVE’s probe ship needs to fly through solar flares and the rings of Saturn to get to it).
As for EVE’s mission and gun, I was convinced enough of that. BnL left the mission in place so that the remaining humans would think that they were eventually going back to Earth. The EVE probes were designed before the ship ever left, and the designers didn’t know if the probes would run into hostile entities. (Feral robots would be the prime candidates, but there are always mutant plants to hypothesize, or the survivors of the people left behind, especially when the original window was 5 years.)
For me, the question that I couldn’t stand was: Why would you let a probe robot onto your ship with a live gun? Why would you do that (1) ever, or (2) especially if you knew that robots sometimes went crazy, or (3) especially especially if you were part of a conspiracy to keep humanity in its place?
— J Mann · Jul 7, 05:59 PM · #
I thought of the question about why probes were still being sent to Earth, and came up with plausible deniability as the answer. The captain doesn’t know about the return to earth being cancelled, and I don’t know if his predecessors did either. So perhaps Auto just decided that it would be easier to pretend that we were still going back to earth someday.
As for the psych ward, it seems logical. The robots in the movie occupy a weird place in between the fully human and simple automata. That’s true both as they are presented to the audience and as they exist in the world of the cruise-line. So they’re not just going to be turned off, but instead put in a psych ward. It’s an old trope that robots would feel some sort of solidarity, and not view each other as mere automata to be casually switched on or off. I guess calling it an old trope doesn’t quite make it make sense.
— Justin · Jul 7, 06:39 PM · #
Noah,
A thoughtful post/review, as always, though I tend to agree with those, like Alan, who think you’re on firmer ground with the small criticisms than the big ones.
I do wonder, though: the car-shaped flies in Cars bothered you because they were inconsistent with a world in which cars talk, laugh, love, and live in and run everything, and in which the rock formations in the Southwest are shaped like automobiles? Methinks the limit of your suspension of disbelief is a little arbitrary!
— Damon Linker · Jul 7, 06:47 PM · #
Hello, Damon – nice to have you with us.
The car-shaped flies bothered me because they took me out of the universe I was in. No, the universe of Cars didn’t make sense – where do new cars come from in this world, for example – but for most of the movie it didn’t really matter; maybe there are people in this world, for example, but the cars just don’t notice them, and think they are running things themselves? The car-shaped flies made me think, “wait a second: are they suggesting there is really a whole car-based ecosystem here? that all animal life is actually automotive? what???” and hence pulled me out of the universe I was in.
Maybe I am just being arbitrary. But, ultimately, all I have to go on are my reactions: did something bother me or didn’t it. If it did, that’s either because I’m a “bad” viewer, or the weavers of this world left a
thread showing that I happened to pull at.
Anyway, if nothing else this thread should satisfy Freddie that even I’m not a Pixar-idolator, for all that I love their movies generally.
— Noah Millman · Jul 7, 07:32 PM · #
The most terribly poignant aspect of the movie – which turned out thankfully to be false – involved the sensations I experienced watching a human-designed movie about two robots in a completely and permanently depopulated world. (I went into the film more or less blind.) The ache of imagining a c. and p. d. world is so intense that of course we humans would want the robots in question to be anthropomorphized, one way or the other. But not too much: we have to be wistfully reminded of what life was like BEFORE. Yet, not too little, either: we want even a crippled, automated, human-programmed romance to be as universal-yet-idiosyncratic as any of our own. That the filmmakers were able to keep up this rollercoaster vortex of pathos in tension for as long as they did is what lifted the film up into the heights of art for me… yet that art could only function as a warning that ultimately condemned itself, unless it got us onto the Axiom — which some see as the lame-o turning point in the film, but I see as the relieving and necessary return to the sometimes lame, but always us, us. For what it’s worth.
— James · Jul 7, 08:40 PM · #
I am more and more in love with my “feral robot” fanwank all the time. On reflection, I think it follows almost necessarily from the film set-up.
Sure, 700 years later, Wall-E is the last robot in any of the scenes we see, and we see a Wall-E graveyard, but 5 years after the exodus, it would have been a different story – an entire planet’s worth of robots, some portion of which would have avoided getting shut off (or were turned back on by other robots), many of whom are going crazy over time.
5 years out under the original mission plan, the Axciom was due to start sending out probes into what was likely to be an earth both (1) devoid of organic life and (2) possibly quite hostile. That would explain EVE’s gun, her reaction to WALL-E, and her reaction to the magnet.
My gripes are (1) why would you let one of your probes on board without disarming the gun? and (2) you cannot build a skyscaper out of cubes, particularly if you expect it to withstand regular hurricanes. (The skyscrapers were the ultimate in “looks cool, doesn’t make sense”, IMHO.)
— J Mann · Jul 7, 08:45 PM · #
I have to agree with all who found the tilting ridiculous. It’s the moral equivalent of parsec as a unit of distance.
— Mike · Jul 8, 05:42 AM · #
If the tilting bothers you people, you’re really not going to like that frickin’ loom in Wanted.
— southpaw · Jul 8, 06:38 AM · #
The tilting isn’t really any more ridiculous than anything else during the big climax. In order to get the ship to go back to Earth they must put the plant in some container in the Lido deck while the passengers are all assembled? Huh? This only makes sense as a plot mechanism, otherwise once EVE returned with the plant the ship would have automatically headed back to Earth. Any manual override of the secret autopilot order should have been straightforward and simple, with no need for all the fooferah and ship tilting. The movie may have been aiming high with themes and visual design, but it certainly stayed in the kiddie realm with the science and the plot.
— Jacob · Jul 8, 06:58 AM · #
Clearly EVE was packing heat in case she ran across a malfunctioning robot. Which she does. But instead of blasting the malfunctioning robot to hell she falls in love.
— Kári Tulinius · Jul 8, 12:15 PM · #
“Why does it take WALL•E to bring us home? What has he learned that we need to learn from him?”
I think you were clearly distaught from the various minutae you mentioned to see what the message was.
WALL-E is primarily a love story. Many critics most likely saw this as interwoven with the “global-warming-humans-are-fat-earth-destroying-pigs” to make the movie more watchable for a general audience, but I wholeheartedly disagree. It’s the central plot; you have many complaints about the plot because you let this point go once you hit the Axiom.
What has WALL-E learned (from us) that we need to re-learn from him? It is love. It is companionship, connection, and visceral humanity.
WALL-E, as you mentioned, is programmed to do nothing more than compact trash. Yet as the centuries pass, and he canvasses the earth alone in his directive, he begins to “evolve” (another small sub-plot that largely goes unnoticed). WALL-E differentiates between what is normal rubish and what pieces of garbage have some sort of mysticism attached to them. To WALL-E, the most mystical item he has uncovered is a tape of a 1960’s romance film which shows two humans holding hands, experiencing a profound joy and happiness through companionship. WALL-E is mesmerized by this picture: primariliy because he has been alone for what one could estimate to be at least a few centuries, but also because WALL-E has seemed to develop an inquisitive mind for all things human. Arguably, there is no more uniquely human emotion than love. It’s this feeling (and the action of holding hands) that WALL-E seeks.
Enter EVE, her directive, Project Recolonize, the Axiom, humanity, and the rest of the plot. All of this ties together neatly because WALL-E is singularly motivated by his love for EVE, his companion. In the end, humanity and the natural Earth are reunited (indeed saved) due to the actions of one simple robot, who in turn had NO CLUE what he was doing…he just wanted to hold EVE’s hand.
So the message we learn is that in a modern society with technology beginning to take even more and more of our “humanity” away from us everyday, as we overconsume and overpopulate every corner of the planet, as we war and fight, live and die, there are only 2 things that will forever cement us as human: nature (Earth) and our ability to love. The message follows: as long as we maintain these elements, our humanity will never be lost, and we will never be alone.
— mattc · Jul 8, 12:37 PM · #
Noah wonders where, in the Cars universe of sexed cars that seem to follow human relationship norms, “where do new cars come from?”
To which I can only say, someone really should have told you this a long time ago.
But for now, well, there’s a car stork, sort of like there’s car flies, you see, and….
— Sanjay · Jul 8, 01:46 PM · #
We are being softened up for our soon-to-come robot overlords.
- The Matrix (robots, humans unite against bad power and start a new truce on Earth)
-Battlestar Galactica (we and the robots will return to Earth together) – the Transformers movie (good super robots help save us from bad super robots, and all our technical advances were harvested from the robot’s power cube).
And now Wall-E.
Even in the most apocalyptic series of robot-human films—Terminator—a robot bridged the gap to help humans.
There’s no overt robot lobby, but I suspect Spielberg and Jobs are their main agents behind the scenes. Spielberg softened us up to the idea of ‘different’ intelligence with ET and Close Encounters, using non-existent aliens as a proxy for his real clients (when aliens had served their purpose, they were turned evil in Independence Day).
Later, other movies start to soften us up for the robots with an anti-robot film (Terminator), and then twist that into the current propaganda: good robots will join with us AFTER almost all humans die.
And Steve Jobs? He is making sure that each of us has a small computer on our bodies every waking minute, and that we get all of our information through it. (How does this robot overlord theory account for Larry David? He is paving the way, weakening our love for human ‘kind’.)
If I’m right, then there should be a big film soon that celebrates the apocalypse and shows an Earth with robots living the good lives that we were too weak to live (Cars was a very early effort, but too human-y). Because they’re not really planning to keep us around, even as pets, and they’re not really planning human-robo hybrids. We won’t be in their movies.
— tom · Jul 8, 02:31 PM · #
If I may: * EVE’s weaponry may have been designed as a tool, much the way Wall-E’s laserbeam was a cutting tool, and EVE just simply dialed up the power to 11. * The gaping plothole about why EVE was hunting for flora while in fact Project Recolonize was canceled? The only one who knew was AUTO, the evil steering bot, who was told via Classified info (A113) to Stay The Course and not tell the humans about it. AUTO had to maintain the Recolonize hunt for flora in order to keep up the pretense: if he stopped sending out probes someone would have started asking the wrong questions. He had no intention of giving up his control, which is why they stole the plant out of EVE before the Captain would see it. * And about the science fiction being wrong (sound in space, the micro-gravity quibbling, the tilting effect)… Dude. Science in science fiction films have always been wrong! There’s been perhaps ONE SciFi film to get the science right (TRON! No wait, Plan 9! No, hold on. Oh right, Planet of the Apes!) If you quibble about every tidbit of inaccuracy in a film, you might as well not go see any films at all…
— PaulW · Jul 8, 03:43 PM · #
Noah,
MattC nails it. Wall-E — and Wall-E — is teaching us about our essential humanity. There’s a reason Wall-E makes so many of us cry, and it’s not just that he’s cute. For many of us, it’s like Wall-E awakens something in us that we didn’t even realize was sleeping. And our lives are better because of it.
Art can’t aspire to anything higher than that, I think.
— BenjaminL · Jul 8, 04:39 PM · #
AUTO is clearly modeled after HAL. One of the big plot points of 2001 is that HAL’s psychosis is the product of mutually conflicting directives. He’s told to perform two incompatible acts and, as a consequence, goes insane and tries to kill the crew (after first trying to break the link to Earth).
AUTO is in precisely the same situation. On the one hand, he’s given a public directive to search for signs of life on Earth. On the other hand, he has a private directive to prevent the Axiom from returning to Earth.
Here’s the key: so long as no flora is found, the directives aren’t in conflict. Given that AUTO is specifically told that the plan to recover the Earth is a failure, he has no reason to believe that any of the EVE units will ever find signs of life. As such, he can comfortably follow his programming and allow both directives to operate.
It’s only when EVE actually shows up with a plant that things go wrong and AUTO is forced to mutiny.
To be sure, if AUTO were a human, he probably would have found some excuse to scrap the EVE missions, but he’s not. He’s a machine and he’s simply following his programming. Most of the machines in the story are like that, it’s only the “defective” units like WALL-E and, eventually, EVE that manage to transcend their directives (note the scene where EVE tosses aside the plant, points to WALL-E and says “directive”, indicating that she cares more about him than her mission).
There’s a larger metaphor there, too. The humans, too, have become creatures of routine, just like their machines. The irony is that it takes one of their own machines to waken them from their self-induced torpor.
Getting bogged down in nitpicky complaints really does miss the forest for the trees. Sure, the deck tilting was silly, and you’re probably right that EVE’s gun is largely there because it’s cool (although the notion of rogue robots does offer a perfectly fine post-hoc justification). None of that’s really relevant. The story is a lovely fable about love and meaningfulness. The cautionary message of the story isn’t that the planet is become a garbage pile, it’s that humanity shouldn’t become a race of lotus eaters who are so pampered that we become blind to the world around us.
— Andrew Lias · Jul 8, 10:09 PM · #
Art can’t aspire to anything higher than that, I think.
For fuck’s sake.
— Freddie · Jul 9, 02:42 AM · #
MattC nails it.
True, I think, on his central point that it is a love story, and all the good things that happen in the movie are a largely accidental result of his pursuing his beloved.
Wall-E is teaching us about our essential humanity. There’s a reason Wall-E makes so many of us cry, and it’s not just that he’s cute. For many of us, it’s like Wall-E awakens something in us that we didn’t even realize was sleeping. And our lives are better because of it.
Here’s the thing. How many of us need to have it awakened within us that romantic love is a fundamental part of life? Not many, I’d bet. I don’t, anyway. So, to generate a dramatic tension between WallE World and Human World, we’re given a badly caricatured representation of post-love human life. The best the creators could come up with to depict such a life is that everyone is…an obese couch potato addicted to a video screen. Mind-numbingly un-creative.
So, if you think the love story has its cute moments, but is mostly a bust, you’re left with the nature part of the equation. This works better, mainly for greater creativity in its depiction, with WallE making garbage cube skyscrapers and dabbling in junk souvenirs on the side. But there are caveats here: (a) it’s only a secondary theme, (b) the ham-fisted depiction of a single, omnipresent corporation, and ( c) the ham-fisted representation of overconsumption in the form of…obese couch potatoes.
— DKE · Jul 10, 08:11 PM · #