Wall-E 2008
Wall-E doesn’t quite have the one-man-show feel of Cast Away, but it’s close. Wall-E has the whole earth to himself, but instead of a painted volleyball, he has a friend who is a cockroach. Wall-E’s job is to process garbage, left behind by the human race when they finally made the earth uninhabitable via pollution. This is a bleak dystopian future. Don’t worry, it turns out okay and eventually we get additional characters and a story.
There is some very interesting commentary on the human race here. In many ways, this movie offers up a vision on the same level as Logan’s Run or Soylent Green, except without the violence. It is Metropolis if it starred Buster Keaton. I think this is where a lot of the critical acclaim for the movie comes from. I’m not sure it is undeserving of that praise, but I do have to say it runs kind of long even while you sit in wonder of what is going on. It is a think piece dressed up as Toy Story.
There is enough going on that multiple viewings are warranted and maybe even required to really understand everything. So I have somewhat mixed feelings: appreciative of the effort and ingenuity, but a little underwhelmed with the plot. This is the same way I felt when I tried to watch Metropolis and Keaton’s The General. So maybe this is very high praise. This could be classic movie making that I just didn’t appreciate fully, so I will give it a respectable B+ knowing that I may be horribly undervaluing what could just as easily be a timeless classic.
Written: 13 Jul 2008
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital