Leave it to that potently professional combination of Pixar and Disney to tell, in wonderful, enjoyable fashion the tale of a cute little, lonely solar-powered futuristic robot, to make tons of points about today’s society, the dangers we face (rampant consumerism, trashing our planet, etc.) and to do so with many references to the classic movies of the past, from Poseidon Adventure to 2001’s Hal to… well, let’s just say it all goes so swimmingly that I tried to applaud. Just darn few joined me.
A friend who was anxiously looking forward to the movie told me she felt a bit let down about the none-too-subtle save-the-planet messages. But truly, the saga of Wall-E (they sent full-size replicas to the theaters, as shown above) and his love of Eve is a throwback in every good sense of the word to the best movies of the past. (It features a whole lot of 1969’s “Hello Dolly,” which makes nobody’s best of lists but makes for a convenient touchstone.)
And the movie literally toys with the issue I and many others discuss and ponder all the time – will technology save us, or kill us? You could say that in this movie, it does both, sort of.
I mean, it takes one super-flabby starship captain with backbone to buck the company (Buy N’ Large, BNL apparently supplants the world’s governments – and Fred Willard is the presidential CEO! Classic! And the Bare Naked Ladies have those initials, too) HAL-ish autopilot and get those fellow flabby never-walk folks back to Earth, where mankind must clean up the trash, start planting and start all over again. In a sense, it’s teamwork of man and machine that saves the day – and I happen to think that’s a pretty neat point to make, and pretty darn rare.
But the question then arises – if all that were to happen, if we were to survive despite ourselves, would mankind make the same mistakes again? We are who we are, and even if we learn one very painful lesson over centuries as refugees, it seems we can stumble into a whole bunch of others once back home, all too easily – it’s what we do best. 😉
So this movie works on many levels – a love story, a fable, just a fun time. I’m sure some mega-conservatives will call it brainwashing of our children. Balderdash and poppycock. (Oh, and if you have the option, be sure to see it at Regal’s DLP screen, as we did Ratatouille – my eyes don’t like 3-D at all, but this technology makes everything so vivid and bright, it’s like Dolby for the eyes – wowzers!)
All this plot-reflecting will make more sense once you’ve seen the movie, which I, BARN-E (Biological Animated Rushed Nerd-Energetic) highly recommends.
Leave it to Barney 