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| WALL-E **** Director: Andrew Stanton “WALL-E” begins with a bang. The setting is in space where the first notes of “Put on Your Sunday Clothes”, from “Hello, Dolly!”, brim with the promise we found in golden age musicals. The camera zooms in towards Earth and hovers above a landscape that seems both familiar and desolate. There appears to be what look like skyscrapers and remains of what once was a giant metropolis. At second glance we realize that they’re structures made out of garbage blocks. The streets are empty, everything is silent and then we see a small robot responsible for all that work. As the cheerful lyrics go “We're gonna find adventure in the evening air…we're gonna ride through town in one of those new horse drawn open cars” and we watch a desert, the juxtaposition couldn’t be creepier, somewhat darkly funny and sadder if it tried. We can’t help but wonder what went wrong here. WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is the last of his kind; created, out of a series of robots, with the purpose of cleaning up the planet while humans left on a space cruise from which they never returned. As WALL-E goes through his daily routine of cleaning and collecting objects which he treasures, we get glimpses of a society that was overcome by consumerism. Everything is accompanied by a “Buy ‘n Large” tag and old newsflashes reveal a world that was slowly becoming completely dependent on robots and products. WALL-E however, seems to have no conscience of this, he spends his days working along with a cockroach who has become his pet and when he goes home he orders the treasures he’s found during the day. Among his favorite things is a worn down VHS copy of “Hello, Dolly!” which he watches religiously, learning how to dance in the process. But the one thing that fascinates him the most is the idea of company. During one of the numbers he watches a man and a woman hold hands as they sing a love song. His eyes are filled with longing and at once we know that there’s more than metal and bolts to him. One day, a mysterious ship arrives, bringing with it EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) a sleek, white, advanced technology robot on a mission. The minute he sees her, it’s love at first byte. And while he tries her best to win her, she ignores him in order to work on her assignment. Things change when the spacecraft returns taking EVE away. Panicked with the idea of losing the only being he’s ever loved, WALL-E becomes a stowaway on the ship that takes him on the trip of a lifetime where he encounters what remains of humanity. The film, which possesses a delightful historical conscience (just watch the magnificent end credits to confirm this), might as well be divided in two chapters. The first one is an ode to silent films and musicals (as weird as it sounds) in which the filmmakers challenge themselves by removing almost all traces and need of dialogue. The robots communicate through beeps that form necessary words, which isn’t to say that they couldn’t have done without them, and WALL-E relies on his favorite songs to express things he didn’ t know existed. This gives the film a mystifying, postmodernist depth that makes us wonder if there will actually come a time when we learn about emotions from artifacts we created (a latter sequence has one key character trying to define elements we think we know, which leads to surprising, heart wrenching conclusions). Will things as love eventually be time capsule objects? That WALL-E loves the movie so much isn’t as fascinating as the fact that he uses it as an element to learn about something that obviously evaded the human race’s attention. A combination of Charles Chaplin, E.T and “Short Circuit”’s Johnny 5, WALL-E is both lovable and distant. That he has acquired a personality doesn’t fully make him fit within the world that disappeared and when later during the film he has encounters with different beings, WALL-E’s differences make him only more conscious of how deeply he wants to love and be loved. The second part of the film is a breathtaking sci-fi cautionary tale. Borrowing elements from “2001: a Space Odyssey”, “Battlestar Galactica” and an array of Spielberg and Pixar references; this is the make it or break it part of the film, where it delivers a message that conveys a darkness we aren’t accustomed to receive from animated features. Director Stanton aptly balances on the thin line between preachiness and conscience, because, in theory, “WALL-E” should’ve just worked as a short film and when it reaches new depths it never feels like the dreadful extension of a good thing. On a visual level, everything here is breathtaking; the painstaking detail in the characters and sets may sometimes be too much to absorb at once and several scenes along with Thomas Newman’s minimalist, but glorious, score make for some unforgettable moments. But the film, like its main character, is completely conscious of its role and knows that in order to succeed in its mission what it needs the most is a soul. That two robots fall in love isn’t as surprising as the fact that long before it happens, we have connected to them. Like the emotion itself, it’s somehow impossible to explain how it happens, yet it’s there and we know it. Despite the fact that the plot isn’t very subtle with its alleged political agenda, it achieves a level of sublime universality which isn’t conveyed by its removal of the language barrier, but mostly by the pure love it shares. Doing this, it’s able to remove the idea of politics from the audience (after all what would kids know about any of this?) to concentrate on the spark of change. Stanton is too good a filmmaker to serve us all on silver platter and while the plot never reveals truly what went so wrong with people in the planet, it’s also smart enough not to condemn everyone. From the very start it’s obvious that the WALL-E we get to know was one of a larger group, in fact one of the film’s most disturbing scenes has him stride along the corpses of obsolete WALL-Es. So there comes a time when we have to start asking ourselves why did only this one survive? Why does he keep working and doing activities that seemed to be of no relevance to others before him? One of the ads featured has a salesman affirming that “our ancestors will love to see that we’re doing the same things they did 700 years ago”. The promise of hope and apocalypse held within these words carries the entire essence of the film. “WALL-E” works as a divine contradiction, because it’s both beautiful and terrifying; with the irony being that despite its beauty and emotional truthfulness, one has to hope that events to spark something like it will never come to happen. |