Where the hell have I been?
I’ve been getting outside and enjoying summer and spending time with friends. Sue me.
Anyways, back to blogging about movies.I’m pretty sure that I covered this in Day Whatever with The Iron Giant, but if I have to choose another one (which I’m assuming the Council of Facebook Memes has decreed I do) then I guess I choose:
Wall-E (2008)
The tale of a lonely robot who keeps himself amused in an empty world by collecting the relics of the vacant Earth’s past. A trash compactor with a curiosity streak, Wall-E spends the first part of the movie silently inspecting the garbage left behind by humanity and “oooh”ing & “aaaahhh”ing over ring holders, fire extinguishers, and bras. He is accompanied by his pet cockroach. There is hardly any sounds other than the ambient noise of an empty planet.Yet, Wall-E is a charming character. He’s a goof who is fascinated by the simplest things and seems to romanticize the trivial. It’s no wonder I like him so much.
The profile of humanity is pretty bleak. We fill the Earth with our trash then we book it for the stars, leaving an army of robots to clean up. There is a shot off Wall-E, holding onto a rocket ship for dear life as it makes it way out of Earth’s orbit. As the rocket burst through the atmosphere, it crashes through a wall of space debris. We’ve even destroyed the heavens surrounding our home. And when humans get screen time, they’ve used the generations since leaving earth to become fat and lazy. They just float around on leisure chairs and suck on “slurpee meals”.
The character reminds me somewhat of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot (much like in Tati’s Playtime, Wall-E shows how absurd people’s reliance on technology can be) after he arrives on the Nautilus, the spacecraft that houses what’s left of the human race. He is unaware of how robots act on the Nautilus, of how he is supposed to fit into the societal structure of this giant space Love Boat. He marvels at the sights, but having a whole new set of experiences in front of him, he is baffled by how robots and humans act. He is an awkward, shy, smitten machine that just wants to hold the hand of the beautiful iRobot that has captured his mechanical heart, but can’t figure out what is going on around him.
Okay, Wall-E is kind of dim, but he’s lovably dim. He’s also heroic. It’s one of the advantages of being dim that you don’t always think through things enough to see how badly it all turn out for you. Wall-E jumps to the rescue and it almost always turn out badly for him. He gets crushed, shot into space, flushed down a garbage shoot, and almost killed. Or deactivated, or whatever. Given a second to think about it, he probably wouldn’t fling himself into these situations, but he know that it’ll make the lovely EVE robot happy, or safe.It’s all pretty romantic, in a grand, swashbuckling way like Errol Flynn saving Olivia de Havilland, by way of Danny Kaye.
Wall-E is almost as “human” a character as has been in any other movie produced in a live-action Disney movie in years.
