I watched Wall-E for the first time yesterday. The first 20minutes I was presented with a picture of boredom, simplicity and complexity mixed together. It’s a silent movie including a robot with a pair of binoculars perched on a metal box wheeling around cleaning up an inhabited town that‘s all. But little by little I discovered and appreciated the marvellous work of imagination of Pixar. In fact it has a great message.
The gentle, smiling little robot is Wall-E. His daily routine consists of sweeping garbage, compacting them and stacking them in heaps. He is followed by a lonely cockroach whom he befriends. For how long he does that and where he started we don’t know; but looking at the stacked garbage which has reached skyscrapers level give us an idea that this has been going on for quite a while.
Wall-E has a taste for particular objects which strike his fancy. While cleaning he picks up items which seems interesting here and there . For instance he picks up a round “attractive lid” which he decides to keep and a blue box containing a diamond ring. He throws the ring and keeps the box leaving us smiling. Robot thing isn’t! We love diamond rings and Wall-E loves the blue box. His pass time is spent in his ramshackle headquarters watching replays of Hello Dolly, suspecting that there is a lot to learn from humans.He is later joined by Eve another robot dropped on earth by a spaceship. Eve is an investigator, her mission is probably to analyse earth condition to see if humans can live in it again. In the meantime Eve and Wall-E become best friend and wall-e falls for her. Mission accomplished eve has to leave as the spaceship has come back to take her. Madly in love now, wall-E will cling to the spaceship to follow Eve.
Back in space the world of Eve, Wall-E discover a different life. There millions of people live in an luxurious orbiting space, piloted by an obese commander who spends his life in idleness among the passengers. Humans are served by sophisticated auto programmed robots purposely for that task. People’s lives are so wealth off that they can hardly move on their own and they are all obese.This is ironic. The movie is in fact a prevailing fear to show that we are so damned consumed by latest technology that our planet could be at risk. Our rampant consumption, capitalism and competition, our futile selfish greediness to live in a luxurious world will bring our planet to its knees. So to speak.
Besides when humans are so absorbed by futility and turn crazy to the point of putting an end to civilisation, will robots be more intelligent and take over. Can wall-E restores life on planet earth and teaches us that they are now better than us because they can think wisely and find new solutions to tackle problems?Wall-E (Two-Disc and BD Live) [Blu-ray]
