WALL*E (2008)

Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Pictures
Directed by: Andrew Stanton

The Earth, from space. (Surrounded by a thick layer of satellites.)

Music plays:
Out there
There's a world outside of Yonkers
Way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby
There's a slick town, Barnaby

Long zoom in. The Earth, circa 2800. The oceans are dry, and no vegetation can be seen.

The zoom continues. Now we can make out towering buildings, teetering slightly.

Zoom in further. The music fades in and out as a tiny speck moves across the screen.

More zoom. They're not buildings, but enormous towers of trash. And the tiny speck is a robot--the last robot on Earth.

For this opening scene alone I would buy the movie when it comes out on DVD.

The robot is, of course, the movie's titular character WALL*E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), the last survivor of many thousands (millions?) of robots designed and built by the Buy'N Large Company (BNL) to clean up the Earth after it had been spoiled by humanity.

WALL*E spends its days compacting trash and collecting the few rare treasures it finds amongst the waste, until a spaceship visits Earth and leaves behind a probe called EVE, which is there to discover whether the planet has become inhabitable again. (And is, of course, the eventual romantic interest for the solitary WALL*E.)

I loved this movie. I knew I would enjoy it from the moment I heard it was from Pixar - how's that for a reputation? - but the film exceeded my expectations completely. From the opening shot described above, to the dance in space, to the cinematography, to the social and political commentary, it's a rare piece of true science fiction in film that's approachable and entertaining. (I read a review that compared WALL*E to Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and let me say, while the comparison may be apt in terms of cinematography, WALL*E is a film I will watch again.)

The main themes of the movie are environmentalism, consumerism, conformity/self-identity and, of course, love. Love is explored through EVE and WALL*E - WALL*E's personality has developed through ages of operation, and EVE's slowly develops through its interaction with WALL*E (though there are some hints at it from its first appearance, and also in the other robots throughout the movie). I find it somewhat unfortunate that EVE and WALL*E are gendered (EVE is the aloof exotic, barely even aware of WALL*E, who is the goofy lonester that eventually wins her heart), even though it is fairly minimal overall. I understand, though, that it is done to help the movie be more approachable to a mainstream audience.

Consumerism and conformity are wrapped up together in the surviving humans and their "benevolent" ruler, the Buy'N Large Corporation. By the time the Earth is evacuated, 700 years prior to the movie's setting, BNL has taken control of the entire planet - no service provided is not touched (or offered outright) by BNL. As the refuse problem spirals out of control, BNL constructs vast space ships to carry Earth's population away; ostensibly on a 5-year cruise while the robots clean the planet. It reminds me greatly of the fiction of Frederik Pohl, particularly The Merchants' War.

Modern humanity, of a much expanded sort, continues to live in these space ships; or at least on one, the Axiom, where all needs are tended to by an army of robots as people are rushed about upon hover chairs, drinking the latest Cupcake-in-a-cup and chatting with their neighbors via the chair's screens. Unfortunately, two of these supposedly mindless creatures are pulled out of their chairs and begin to discover the world around them. The concept would be much more terrifying if they didn't, much more impactful, although it does allow the filmmaker to point out the wonders - simple and grand - that everyone else is missing, so I suppose it's not all bad.

Environmentalism is the most obvious theme, of course. The Earth has been ravaged beyond habitation. No plants grow in this wasteland. And yet, this disregard is continued on the Axiom, where garbage is fed into the bowels of the ship, to be compacted by enormous WALL*As before being jettisoned into space (can you tell the ships were designed by BNL?).

This leads me to my biggest complaint about the movie: believability. There were moments when I was cocking my head to one side and saying, "Does not compute!" The physics is not terrible, and most of it could probably be easily explained away, but some of the physics problems were: were does the gravity on the ship come from? Why does everyone fall to the side when the ship turns, exactly like on a sea-faring ship? Where do they get the energy or raw materials for everything consumed by the humans? How can humans - big, fat humans - that have spent their entire lives in their hover chairs stand up and walk at the end?

But the most important believability failure is something I've only just now realized: we are left with the presumption at the end that everything will be all right now: the humans have learned their lesson and will now become the proper stewards they should've been all along. But how? These humans have spent their entire lives not having to think about stewardship and conservation, not to mention several generations before them as well. They hadn't changed when WALL*E arrived, as evidenced by the tons of waste jettisoned each minute. While I will admit the events of the movie are certainly a life-changing experience, I can't believe they could change so drastically so quickly.

However, despite all of these nit-picks, I still highly recommend WALL*E for everyone. You won't be disappointed.

(PS I almost want to call this WALL*E: An Ambiguous Dystopia, because the contrast between Earth and Axiom remind me of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossesed: An Ambiguous Utopia. But that's probably discourse for another time.)

EDIT:
Please read UniversalCitizen's comment as well; he addresses many other troubling points with the movie.

Okay, new look for the blog 'cause I thought the default style had been there long enough. More changes ahead? Who can say? Probably.

Hmm, well let's see. Monday night I... screwed around on the computer until bedtime. Played some Freeciv for a while until it unexpectedly crashed on me. I'm not angry though. Firstly, it was just the client that crashed; the server was still up and running, and secondly I don't think there were any other players in the world. Not even AI, so I'll have to figure out how to do that soon here.

Tuesday, Physics was cancelled because the sub got in a car accident on the way to class, so I'm hoping the final won't have much on PDEs. Rise/Fall Rome was interesting. The prof went over some sample test questions and then described some work he'd done in Turkey at Aperlae. After that was lunch, and I was heading back home when I saw Sarah, so I decided I should probably do some office hours and followed her up to the office. Fortunately, Scott had left a Game Developer Magazine in the office, and I read that for a while before I read some more Utopia. Then to LGBT Studies, where we had our final presentation. All that remains is to turn in my paper revisions and take the final. Woohoo! I worked a bunch on the paper last night, and on my Semantics take-home as well. So far, so good.

This morning, work... And I found out that my work schedule for finals week is actually going to work out! Of course, I have to go in at 7:30 on Sunday, but otherwise it's very nice. Class today was okay. Gave my email addy to Andy, we'll see whether anything comes of that. I ran into Todd after lunch and spoke with him for a while before coming back here. Then Papu and Kyonee dropped by, those silly boys. We talked for a while before they had to go do some work. And here I am.

Utopia's... interesting. Some aspects about it, such as the seemingly socialist nature of Utopia, are very appealing. Other aspects discussed, such as essentially permanent enslavement of thieves (though, granted, this was in a neighboring country and, in addition, did sound quite a bit better than capital punishment), are appalling. Nevertheless, it's interesting so far, once I get past the wall of language that is old formal english (not anglo-saxon, though).

That's 'bout it for now.

Geoff

Hmm, well I just read Jason's blog and... whew, if only he weren't conservative. Stupid lousy intelligent conservative fags. Where are all the prudish intelligent anarchist fags? Oh well. Anyway, I realized what I'm doing wrong: I'm not posting anything interesting. Let me rephrase that. I've been describing events, which dad says is on the second level of intelligence. (Below that is discussing people, and above it is ideas.) So it's time to step it up a notch.

But first I need to think.

This is actually something that's been disturbing me for some time. I used to think. I used to have ideas and intelligent conversations. I also used to enjoy my music and get pleasure from reading. Lately, however, I've... stopped.

I was talking with Jeff the other day, and we came to point in the conversation where I said that my geekiness was in decline. "I used to be a tech geek," I said, "but haven't been recently. I'm more into RPGs and comics." "You've fallen backwards," Jeff told me. And he's right.

I've begun to correct the situation, I hope. I've begun reading again, poetry in particular. I read a collection of T.S. Eliot the other day and I just finished reading a collection of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as well. I liked Longfellow better than Eliot because of the meter and rhyme. Eliot's style does not very much appeal to me. But, and perhaps I have read superficially, neither seems to have much import to me. They seem pretty, but merely for pretty's sake. I am about to embark on a reading of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, which should interest me much more than the poetry.

A piece of advise: read Nozick. And then laugh at him.

And the obligatory rundown of my last few days:

Yesterday was my birthday. It was nice. I'm not at all displeased with it. Of course, I still ended up alone at the end of the night, but you know what a prude I am. Here's what happened. I woke up early for some reason (I think it was the jerks galloping around in the hallway screaming, but I could be wrong. I have been waking up early lately), got showered and went into work to turn in my finals schedule and collect my goody bag for "Student employee appeciation day." It's basically food, which is good, but not really what I was hoping for. Plus the soda was Mountain Dew. Anyway, physics was okay (No Craig again, I swear I'm going to beat that boy to a bloody pulp if I see him tonight) and I went to history because, as Jason says, I'm here to get an education. And it was interesting, the lecture gave me new insight into the connectivity of the world by the manifold (from anglo-saxon maniyfeald 'complicated'. I apologize for the lack of the yogh... my system doesn't seem to have it on any of my fonts and I can't find its unicode reference) reasons for the collapse of Rome (western Rome, anyway). Everything from the barbarian hordes to the public baths to the changing climate to a love of cheesecake (from the Farmer's Almanack, a veritable wellspring of verifyable and easily tested information) has been blamed for the fall. And it's cool to imagine the interplay of all these factors "converging" to lead to the fall of central political authority in the west.

Anyway, after class I met Nara and Jill for lunch, and that was good. Jill and I went to the bookstore, where they were having a sale and a drawing for an iPod, as well as cider and cake. (I didn't win the iPod, at least I haven't received anything saying that I did and they had me leave my phone number and email address.) Nara used the time to work on a paper she's writing for class. Afterwards, Jill and I picked Nara up and played some pool. This was about 2pm, which is when the cute british guy had been coming in. Unfortunately, he was not there yesterday. Then I went to LGBT studies, where there was a presentation on gays in television, which was interesting. I came back, and went up to see Brandon for a while. I actually finished my page for the fraternity bio-book, yay! It looks cool, too. Papu came and hung out with us for a while, and then Papu and I went to go watch Kyonee perform in a series of one-act plays. Well, he was in three of them. He's a rather decent actor. I was quite impressed. After, I came back home and it was bedtime.

Today... Work, school, nothing special Going to a party tonight provided things work out well. We'll see.

Some poetic nonsense:

A jibber once danced on my head
"Your head is quite hard," he said,
"It's large, and it's thick!"
So I grabbed up the prick
And that night on jibber I fed.