Has there ever been a movie that comes recommended by so many people and in so many ways, you know it has to be amazing - mainly because there’s no way it could fail?

WALL-E was that movie for me.  It came recommended by two people who usually have pretty good taste in movies, and a radio announcer who managed to sound sincere when he raved about it. 

Not only that, but let’s look at Pixar’s track record.  Cars.  Monster’s Inc.  Finding Nemo.  Here’s a studio that’s been making some of the best animated movies around for years.  I thought the one glitch on their repertoire was the vastly over-rated The Incredibles, and it seems to be only me and a few other people who didn’t like that. 

Then I watched WALL-E.  The basic story appears to be something along these lines:  Sometime in the future, Earth has become a desolate wasteland.  Humans have completely ignored Captain Planet and let Earth become so polluted it’s inhabitable.  So the Government (who from what I could tell seemed to be a US Government, although it’s not really specified), has evacuated the planet and sent down a small robot called WALL-E to clean it up.  WALL-E has been dong his job for years, with very little change to routine.  Then one day EVE is sent down, and WALL-E falls in love.  When EVE returns to the spaceship that now holds Earth’s population, WALL-E follows and chaos ensues.

So let’s break this down.  Point number one:  Humans have completely disrespected that planet they’ve called home for so many years, and the lesson is (in a movie aimed at children, no less) that not only is this OK, but hey, come live on a luxurious spaceship where you can sit on your backside all day every day getting fat and lazy, and a robot will clean the planet up so you can go back to it one day.  Do you want your kids to learn that?  I sure as hell don’t.  And are humans in this movie shown as at least trying to learn where they went wrong so they can take better care of the planet next time?  Like bloody hell.  With the exception of the ship’s captain, the entire human race is shown as just sitting in hover chairs with a fruit cocktail in their hands.

Point number two:  WALL-E is hardly an effective cleaner anyway.  When we see him going about his job as he was programmed to do it, he scoops rubbish into an empty compartment where his stomach would be, which then shapes the rubbish into a rectangle.  WALL-E removes it, and stacks it up into piles, before repeating the process.  So, forget the whole idea of coming back to a clean planet, humans are going to be coming back to the same over-polluted planet they left, they’re just going to find neatly stacked towers of trash everywhere.  As if that’s going to somehow make the planet more inhabitable. 

Point number three:  WALL-E’s behaviour around EVE makes no sense whatsoever.  He’s a robot sent to Earth to “clean it up”.  She’s a robot sent to Earth to find some kind of sign it’s ready for humans to return.  But despite the fact WALL-E and EVE are supposedly male and female, respectively, that’s no reason for them to fall in love.  (Hell, in today’s largely open society, that’s not even a prerequisite.)  My issue here is that “love” is not a robot emotion.  In fact, there’s no such thing as a robot emotion.  No reason is given for WALL-E and EVE to have been programmed to act the way they do, and seeing as they’re robots, if they’re not programmed to do something, they can’t do it.  No ifs, buts or maybes.  It’s simply impossible.  End of. 

So what have we learnt so far?  If we over-pollute the planet, we’ll all be evacuated to a spaceship where we’ll live lives of complete laziness and obesity, while a robot cleans up Earth.  Except that said robot will just re-organize the trash instead of cleaning it up, and he’ll somehow defy programming to chase a female anyway. 

But to write a review on WALL-E without talking about the lack of dialogue would be to make a major omission on my part.  And in a way, that’s exactly what the lack of dialogue between WALL-E and EVE is - an omission.  I can kind of begin to understand the logic behind it - considering the reasons why WALL-E and EVE are on Earth, they don’t really need to talk, and would therefore have been programmed with very little in the way of speech capabilities.  But as already discussed, they’re going to defy their programming anyway, so why not go the whole way and have them able to speak more than a few words to each other?  It would certainly make all those chase scenes aboard the ship a lot easier to make sense of. 

It would also make the movie seem a lot less lethargic.  It may be a mere 98 minutes long, but when you’re constantly searching for a storyline and trying to make sense of what’s happening on-screen, that can seem like much longer, which makes it all the more disappointing when the story just never seems to materialize.

However, there is one redeeming story featured in this movie - that of the ship’s captain.  While he has allowed himself to get as fat and lazy as the rest of the population (all his work is done for him, aside from the morning announcement, which changes very little from day to day, due to life aboard the ship being so mundane), he still attempts to learn about Earth, in a belief that humans will one day be returning.  We see and hear him asking the ships computer all kinds of questions about life on Earth, and he eventually becomes the only character in the whole movie worth referring to as a hero.  But despite all his efforts to learn and then pass on the necessary knowledge to make sure humans don’t repeat their mistakes, I was still left with the feeling that he’ll never succeed, as all those years aboard the ship will have left humans with very little morals.  They simply won’t care if they repeat their mistakes, because they believe the solution to be so easy and require no effort on their part.

And that in itself is quite a sad paradox, because watching this movie, it’s clear that a lot of effort did indeed go into making it.  Perhaps not into writing it, as the script has more holes than Amy Winehouse has had cigarettes, but the animation is certainly on par with everything else we’ve seen from Pixar.  The voice acting is adequate - WALL-E and EVE may simply have the same few words over and over, but at least they all sound like they were simply recorded once then that sound byte re-inserted where needed, which would have been all it took. 

So the movie looks and sounds good, but is that enough?  Ultimately, I’m not the target audience here - like most Pixar movies, this is a family movie, made to entertain kids and hopefully amuse adults in places.  With that in mind, I need to put myself into the shoes of the two kids I would show this to - my Godsons, one of whom is three and a half, the other is 8 months old.  I cannot picture the three and a half year old sitting through this, it wouldn’t hold his interest long enough.  The 8 month old might enjoy seeing the pretty colours for the duration of the movie, but he could also get the same enjoyment from a ninety-minute episode of Teletubbies.

Ultimately, WALL-E just falls too flat to really warrant any kind of recommendation.  The lessons kids will take away from it are absolutely shocking, the lack of dialogue only hinders the story, and robots haven’t been given a fair deal here at all.  Sure, the animation looks good, but it also looks good in much better Pixar movies than this.  People often talk about how cute our titular character is, and while I agree to an extent, you’re just not going to find anything of any value or worth if you dig any deeper.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD