“In a world left silent, one heart beeps.” – A. O. Scott
That exactly is how I can elucidate this movie. Its first 30 minutes or so is I can say mind-numbing for there were no human figures neither any dialogues spoken nor narration that would at least explain what the character is doing. The scene is an intricately rendered city, bristling with skyscrapers but bereft of any inhabitants apart from a battered, industrious robot and his loyal cockroach sidekick. Hazy, dust-filtered sunlight illuminates a landscape of eerie, post-apocalyptic silence.
WALL-E (Waste Allocator Load Lifter - Earth Class) is the last of his kind, a robot created by the Buy-N-Large Corporation to clean up the piles of trash left on Earth by the conspicuous consumption of human beings. The humans themselves have evacuated the now-toxically trashed Earth for a Eden-like spaceship habitat called the Axiom (also created by BNL corp.), where they spend their days sipping meals out a cup and reclining on floating easy chairs. Though all his robotic compatriots have long since compacted their last, WALL-E continues plugging away at his job in an endearingly human way. He wakes up each day to the chime of a Macintosh starting up (score for the iFolks! Thanks Steve!) and heads out for another day among the trash heaps. He brings a battered coolie along with him to save the things he likes: a ping-pong paddle, a plastic dinosaur toy, a light bulb, a small seedling saved in an old boot. He ends each day in his home, watching an old video tape of Hello Dolly! - an important motif throughout the film.
WALL-E maintains a quiet, dutiful, and lonely existence. His sole companion is an indestructible cockroach, perhaps a direct descendant of Jiminy Cricket, whose presence confirms the rumor that roaches really will be the last creatures left on Earth. But WALL-E's life changes -- and our story takes off -- when a skyscraper-sized spaceship drops off a second robot, EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), and teases our hero with the potential of friendship.
Things change drastically for WALL-E the day EVE shows up. She is slick and futuristic and quite obviously a girl; WALL-E falls in love almost immediately. It turns out EVE has been sent from the Axiom to scan the earth for signs of habitable life. Their convincing courtship is done completely without dialogue, quite a feat for sound designer Ben Burtt who found a way to make ambient noise into recognizable words for WALL-E. Trying to impress the coolly modern EVE, WALL-E shows her the seedling he found, at which point EVE goes into a hibernation state and awaits the return of her spaceship. WALL-E, of course, cannot abide by his beloved EVE's status and hitches a ride into space to save her.
Though he is tiny and relegated to the dirtiest of the dirty jobs, WALL-E truly understands how to find value in sullied things and how to create magic out of useless objects. He is more human than the humans in that way and slowly, without preaching (he can't even talk), WALL-E begins to show them how to regain what they have lost through sloth and over reliance on technology. It's an environmentalist film, but also a poignant homage to simple joys in this era of iPods and digital everything.
This movie, for as hilarious and touching as it is, is at its heart a brutal indictment of corporate consumer culture. I laughed, I cried too, sometimes out of sentimentality but mostly out of sadness. A world without growing things is indeed uninhabitable and horrible, but a culture that puts comfort and money above ethics and shepherding the resources that make such comfort possible will indeed come to ruin. By the end of the movie, Wall-E's romance with Eve didn't make up for the not-so-subtle damning of our society and its misplaced values.
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