Directive . . . . . ?

I am writing this post for a couple reasons.  Number one because my sister Jackie read my previous posts (which I appreciate – come back all the time Jackie and feel free to comment – and tell your friends!) and asked if I was ever going to write about a movie she has seen.  She has three young kids, so her life pretty much revolves around Pixar and Spongebob.  The second is because this is an awesome movie.  Why is it awesome you ask?  Well let me tell you (that is after all the purpose of this Blog – I could tell you it’s awesome, but I feel obligated to back up that opinion otherwise this would be a very brief Blog).

First of all, without overstating it or over thinking it, this is a very bleak film.  This is a movie about the end of humanity, the collapse of our civilization, all off it.  And that story is told through something we know how to interpret – commercials.   The Earth is a dead lifeless rock filled with the garbage of over commercialization and rampant consumerism.  Our one protagonist for the beginning of the film is a little trash collecting and compacting robot, who seems to know exactly what his job is.  We see others, but they aren’t moving anymore.  We see how he lives, in a storage container which obviously housed dozens like him prior, leaving him the only one left.  Humanity’s last creation.   I am sorry folks, but this is one bleak beginning.  Bergman aspired to be this bleak.

But yet the movie never feel bleak.  It doesn’t necessarily feel happy, but the world Wall-E inhabits is his own.  He understands it.  He backwards engineers an iPod with a VCR to watch “Hello Dolly” over and over again.  The music follows him through a day of collecting and compacting garbage into a new Manhattan Skyline of trash.  He find things we recognize, but he doesn’t.  He is fascinated by a spork, which defies his fork and spoon categorization, a diamond ring has no meaning, but the box is important.  He sees the world with a childlike innocence we all understand and wish we had.  But most of all he wants a friend, which he finds in a cockroach (incidentally Reed – My Girlfriend Stephanie’s son wanted me to make sure I mentioned the cockroach, because he is important).

When a rocket arrives bearing another robot, one more far and sleek than Wall-E, his world is suddenly opened up to think there might be more than compacting garbage.  He stalks the new robot, and eventually befriends her.  Her name seems to be EVE, and we quickly find she is looking for vegetation.  The reasons for this are explained later, but we can assume it has to do with life on earth.  Wall-E isn’t alive, and is therefore unimportant, and is at first disregarded by EVE.  Eventually of course a rocket arrives to return her to space, and Wall-E, thinking he is in love, has no choice but to stow away.

What follows tears the universe of the film apart and takes us in new and unexpected ways.  It is funny, while at the same time tragic.  We see the future of humanity, living in space for 70o years, moving about in chairs with robots doing all of their work.  They sit all day eating meals in cups, and living the way “Buy and Large” (the very corporation that destroyed Earth) wants them to live.  It is a sad commentary on the Wal-Mart society we live in.

Wall-E of course enters and manages to turn everything upside down, bringing the truth to the citizenry, becoming both a hero to some and a villain to the ships supercomputer who is following orders to not return to Earth.  We all know how it ends, but it doesn’t really end.  We can hope for the survival of humanity, but to be honest, they haven’t given us too many reasons to think they will.

This is a hysterically funny movie.  It has moments of peace, and moments of joy.  It is wondrous at times to watch, and difficult at times to accept.  This is a grown up movie, disguised as family fare.  This is a movie that I can watch any time.  Literally – I could watch it right now and it would make me happy.  It seems I spent so much time of this review talking about how sad the film was bleak, but it isn’t sad.  It is hopeful.  It is a warning to us all that this is how we could end up if we don’t change.  Unless we admit the more is not better, that cheaper is not acceptable, that we don’t need stuff to be happy.  What we need is what Wall-E needed – friends, even if they are cockroaches.

Wall-E, awesome because it makes friendship the most important thing in the universe.