Dok Holocaust reviews: Wall-E

Short version:  Disney does dystopian scifi with a wink and a not to the fact that crazy people can save the day.

Long version:  Imagine, if you will, a world run by Wal-Mart.  Wal-Marts built with no limits to their size, a single superstore stretching onwards for miles, several superstores in every town.  Now imagine that nothing is done about all the garbage produced by having giant outlets of cheaply made mostly-disposable merchandise everywhwere.

Wal-Mart turns the planet into a giant garbage dump and evacuates all their customers onto a big space-station for what should have been a five year trip to give their trusty robots a chance to clean everything up.  Sadly, they’d made the world into a dump so toxic it killed all but one of the cleanup-bots, little Wall-E, our hero, and the only surviving humans have spent the past eight generations living in space, getting lazier and less able to move around under their own power with each generation due partly to the bone loss of life in microgravity and party to being waited on hand and foot by the suprisingly functional walmart-bots.

and that’s just the setup.  the movie is actually about Wall-E falling in love with a little enviromental-research bot Eve who has deemed the planet habitable, a Hal-like autopilot on the space-hotel that has decided to keep humankind in space indefinitely as its pets, and a few humans who are actually tired of sitting around doing nothing their whole lives and actually want to get off their ass and do something meaningful.

Wall-E and Eve do get to fight the tyrannical autopilot-bot, with help from the misfit robots from the crazy robot ward, and the bulk of the robots that do everything for the humans just… sit there.  they lack the resourcefulness of self-repairing, cultural-artifact-preserving Wall-E or investigative Eve.  They are just programmed to do a few simple functions at the bidding of humans, and in this, the bulk of the robots wind up coming handy, and you can see how if you watch through the credits.

I did feel a bit let down by the lack of comedic dialogue.  I was hoping for humor more along the lines of the incredibles or similar, but that kinda thing was scarce.  The movie does make up for it with a high density of allusions to other science-fiction and computer-related elements of modern pop culture.

plus, it was fun to watch Eve, who is essentially a flying ipod, blow things up.

Tags: reviews, Wall-E