WALL-E Movie Review
By Jason Revill
I have a friend who doesn’t like animated movies. He’s pretty adamant about it, but since the first time he saw the movie poster he was curious about WALL-E. I found that odd, but after sitting through the preview he’s become just amazed by it. This should have told me something to begin with. Admittedly, we guys tend to mellow out as we get older, but for this dude to really want to see it says it all. When he asked whether or not the movie was any good, the best I good muster was “It’s really good” and when pressed all I said was “Its reeeally good.” What I didn’t want to admit was not only did I enjoy WALL-E and find it visually amazing and funny, but I spent part of the movie getting pretty choked up. There are so many things I like about this WALL-E I hardly know where to begin.
After hundreds of years WALL-E (Waste Allocation Loader Lifter Earth-Class) is happily doing the job he was designed to do: clean up garbage. Day in and day out he compacts the heaps of it into blocks and stacks them into enormous skyscrapers of trash only to go home, watch his copy of Hello Dolly and do it all again the next day. The only company he has as he tirelessly cleans up the abandoned post-apocalyptic Earth is his pet cockroach. That is until a mysterious ship lands and unloads EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator). She’s been sent from the humans, who abandoned their home planet, to find out whether or not Earth has become inhabitable once again. When she discovers what she’s been looking for, EVE is whisked away sending WALL-E on a mission to find her and in the process possibly save mankind.
The characters and their design are just perfect. WALL-E is worn out, rusted and completely utilitarian in design. He’s made to do a job and that’s it, but with that he essentially becomes this sort of robot everyman. Hell, he’s a garbage collector who finds beauty in the mundane. He’s just a guy who goes out everyday and does his job, not asking for anything, but deserving better. When EVE shows up he completely falls head over heals for her. Being both the epitome of form and function, she’s gorgeous. EVE is like some cosmopolitan socialite that makes your iPhone look like crap and is way out of WALL-E’s league. Together these robots have a sort of Woody Allen style romance with WALL-E playing the part of the smitten nebbish.
I’m still stunned how much information and emotion these little robots were able to convey with only having eyes and using two or three words. I’m a grown man, I shouldn’t give a crap about two cartoon robots, but damned if I didn’t. These guys don’t even have faces, just eyes. It’s a brilliant choice, because not only does it give you the ability to get the emotion across, but by allowing the audience to read into it they can sort of superimpose a little of what they themselves are feeling. By that I mean if these characters had a whole face it would be telling the audience exactly what to feel, but this way the room left for interpretation allows each one of us to slip a little more of ourselves into the character.
After I had a little time to reflect on the overall message of WALL-E, I started to get a little worried that maybe some might try and make it out as some sort of left wing pinko propaganda. I know there’s an ecological message here and that you can read into it a whole anti-corporate one, but this film is far more complicated than that. Sure Buy-N-Large is the company that sold humans all the garbage, but ultimately the responsibility falls on the individual. They wouldn’t have sold people the crap in the first place had they not been willing to buy it. The problems humans have found themselves in are based on their own apathy and desire for convenience. Like I said the themes in WALL-E are pretty complicated, after all the company than manufactured Earth’s destruction also made the one robot that can restore man’s humanity. It’s just a matter of getting them up off their asses to do something about it.
Pixar’s work is always top notch, but WALL-E is above and beyond what they’ve done so far. Finding Nemo was an amazing piece of work, but bringing Roger Deakins to help out is a stroke of genius. Who’s better than the seven time Academy Award nominated and the Coen brother’s go-to cinematographer? Deakins, being one of the greatest ever in his field, gives the film a bit more weight by helping Pixar get the sense of what it would look like had there actually been a camera present. It’s a combination that really maximizes the talents of everyone involved. Director Andrew Stanton was unbelievably able to recreated life in the ocean with Finding Nemo and once again he has done something that is just as magnificent.
It’s almost hard to say that WALL-E isn’t a G rated film for adults. Sure it’s going to appeal to kids, but a lot of it is going to go over their heads and the first thirty minutes or so lacks any real dialog, so small kids may get squirmy. The humor is clever without all the obvious pandering pop culture and film references that modern animated films have. There are references, but really they fall more in the area of paying homage to everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to pretty much anything you can slap Spielbergian or Chaplin-esque on. It’s a film that remembers all the great films that came before it and is in itself great. If it can make a prick like me get sentimental there has to be at least something special about it.
The Grade
- Story: A
- Acting: A
- Visuals: A
- Originality: A
- Enjoyability: A
- Overall: A
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