Review: WALL*E

Wall*E deserves every great review it's garnered; it might well be the most entertaining movie of the year. This is the simple tale of a waste collection and compaction droid falling shamelessly and hopelessly in love with a sleek, ipod-influenced recon droid and inadvertently saving humanity from itself. Visually it is breathtaking, but crucially, as with all Pixar works, real care and love have gone into crafting the script: I was in tears of joy and awe throughout.

WALL*E is the only robot left working on Earth (mankind having long since left the planet in massive starliners, overwhelmed by climate change and the detritus of the consumer-based society: waste), building skyscrapers out of the rubbish he compacts, his only a friend a redoubtable cockroach.

He collects man’s ephemera with charming curiosity: plastic cutlery (that after 700 years still hasn’t biodegraded), a Rubic’s cube, a video recording of Hello Dolly (that he watches every night when he gets back to his ‘home’), an egg whisk and a light bulb. Rather disturbingly, he also collects replacement parts for himself from long-since shut-down WALL*Es with nary a second glance.

His tidy little life is opened up when EVE, the sleek, ultra-modern vegetation search robot is dispatched from a passing ship.
WALL*E’s reaction to EVE’s arrival moves swiftly from fear to awe and then to love. While she fails to reciprocate his feelings, she clearly senses a kindred spirit in WALL*E. Their future together comes to a grinding halt when she discovers he has found a plant: her directive fulfilled, she takes the plant and goes into ‘sleep’ mode until the ship returns.

WALL*E attempts to re-awaken her to no avail, and decides that she just needs to go on some dates; while beautifully realized by Pixar’s animators, WALL*E’s thoughtfulness is in vain: the ship returns and removes EVE.

If there’s a criticism to be made of this film, it comes now. Up to this point in the story, Pixar produces its bravest and most original work to date: the only dialogue uttered by the two robots are their names and ‘directive’, otherwise all other emotions are communicated via WALL*E’s beeps and whistles (created by the sound engineer behind R2D2), his body language and the soundtrack. The storytelling is sleek and minimal, pared down for maximum impact. Arguably once the distraught WALL*E smuggles himself on board the ship, the film echoes the likes of Monsters Inc, devolving (with no loss of character, mind) in to series of chases and face-offs.

But that may be a petty criticism in the face of such brilliance and audacity, for the script still has many highs to hit and, indeed, points to make: WALL*E uncovers the full horror of what has happened to humanity: waited on hand and foot by robots, humans are so overweight they no longer walk, instead carried around on hover chairs. Drama, conspiracy, awakenings and near-death ensue, but love ultimately must triumph.

The film features many nods to sci-fi classics (and some not so classics), some conscious (Sigourney Weaver voicing the starliner’s computer announcer), some unconscious (WALL*E’s design is reminiscent of Johnny 5 in Short Circuit). And while the temptation must have been there, there are no pastiches of classic sci-fi scenes: the focus remains on the two hearts at the core of the story.

There are a few intriguing observations that emerge: while the foundations of the story are rooted in a form of apocalypse, its message is one of hope; humanity’s dependency on robots leads them to exist in the same way, lifeless, unquestioningly following a series of procedures and protocols with no curiosity (a frightening warning as computer geeks continue to inherit the earth, their developments almost determining how we live; and yet, perversely, without that hardware and software, this film could not exist); that waste, more than climate change, might be our ultimate downfall; and while we never find out if androids do dream of electric sheep, we do learn that even robots want to hold hands.

Superb stuff. A hanky may be necessary.

Score: 9.5/10