love and robots
"This story told in a different style and with a realistic look could have been a great science-fiction film. For that matter, maybe it is."
-- Roger Ebert
If I may be so arrogant, I'd like to amend that thought: this story starts out telling the great science-fiction film Ebert described, but then discards it in order to tell something much more conventional instead.
Don't get the wrong idea, it's not a horrible movie at all. It's pretty and it's fun. I liked it. But I wanted to love it. I wanted so badly to love it.
Wall-E spends its first twenty minutes, maybe thirty, being the realistic-looking gorgeously and stylistically shot (they consulted Roger Deakins!) science fiction film about ideas. It could have done more with the arrival of the ship, for example. Elsewhere in the above-linked Ebert review, he really touches on where I wanted it to go: Wall-E is the last "living" thing on the planet, super-alone, and does he know what this ship is? What does it represent to his world, a thing like that coming out of the sky? Wall-E is a little robot who spends every day marveling and wondering at (and often reimagining) signifier vs. signified in an abandoned, ruined world. He stares wistfully up at the stars when they manage to break through the smog and dust that enshrouds the Earth. What's a rocket ship to this guy? Apparently, it's nothing special. I mean, for just a couple of seconds you feel like it's the Terrifying Hand Of God Delivering Unto Him An Eve (named EVE), but beyond that fleeting moment of shock and awe, it is nothing. Even upon its return, it is merely what we know it is: a rocket. And from the rocket's second arrival (to retrieve EVE) on, this is not a story of two robots in love being cast out of (or into) paradise. Once we enter the stars and the topsy-turvy world of Fat Humans Being Pampered, the narration takes a sharp turn. The world becomes another Pixar world of sleek, round, shininess, and of recognizable in-jokes and visual gags.
We start the story very much tied to Wall-E's perspective, offering us his world and his view of his world. It's beautiful. (The above still is a perfect example: Wall-E finds a diamond ring inside a velvet case. After a moment he discards the ring back into the rubbish and excitedly keeps the tiny velvet case.) But as soon as humans (and dialogue*) appear, the perspective shifts. Now we are with our people, and we are watching the goofy robot in the futuristic city-ship-world, and it no longer becomes Wall-E's awe and wonder that fill the story. Now the story is carried by our, that is the audience's, (supposed) awe and wonder at all the big neat robots and technology, all the silly luxuries the Fat People have become dependent on. E.T. would have sucked if act two had taken place on board E.T.'s spaceship with all his alien buddies and family and crazy technology and funny language and culture. That's why it doesn't do that.
Wall-E had me won over with the post-apocalyptic junkyard-garden of eden (especially once Eve showed up) and Wall-E's attempt to follow her and save her and eventually woo her--Robots falling in love... Yes! I was ready to fall too. But instead, the narrative had to become Bigger and Broader: it became about the survival (or at least return from a seven-century cultural slump) of humanity, and of course Eve and Wall-E (and about a dozen other "crazy robots") are the only ones who can save them! And let's not forget about the villainous conspirator robots trying to stop them (which admittedly fit the story all right, but still: just another Good Guy/Bad Guy story)! With stakes that high, and a plot that broad (it's practically Toy Story all over again), it's just way less interesting a story than the old clunky box-of-a-robot who really just wants, more than anything in the universe, to hold the hand of that egg-shaped iPod-of-a-robot with the cute girly voice.
Yes, I know how that sounds. A story about robots, and I complain that it loses its humanity too early. A science fiction post-apocalyptic CGI tour de force, and I complain that it isn't enough of a love story. (To be fair to all this: it did an all right job of trying to pick the character/love plot back up in act three, but by then my brain had already checked out, back into Watching A Kid's Movie mode, not Watching A Good Movie mode.)
There's a single theme to the world, one Big Science Fiction Idea: humans have spoiled themselves with machines who do all the work for them that they no longer resemble human beings at all (only they all-too-familiarly resemble every mall-going American stereotypical family). That's all fine and good, and at first you applaud the film for such an open critique of its primary demographic, All-American Suburbia--but by the end that one Big Idea is so basic and singular that long before the movie's over you feel slightly tired. You want... more. Almost anything more.
The bottom line: Wall-E's world and characters start out so damn wonderful, but it doesn't sustain itself. It plays it safe, tells it big and broad, and panders to an audience that you sense it fears may not "get it." I deeply believe it didn't have to do that to work; I believe the story it started out telling (staying with two characters and their story) wouldn't have let anyone down, and would have launched it into classicdom the way E.T. was for my generation. All the thematic points about ecology and consumerism would have been icing on that cake and everyone would have walked away happy.
But Disney and Pixar (and American animation in general, and maybe all big budget popcorn-sellers in general) lack the balls to make a classic. And so, it is what it is.
(I recently made a declaration that I've been repeating when appropriate, and that is this: American animation has no pioneer spirit left. It sucks, but "safe" is the only way it gets played. What a waste of potential! To quote Link quoting H. L. Mencken: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.")
* One more piece of praise for the first part of the movie (a lot of it actually, to Pixar's credit) is: it plays out with virtually no talking, and it's all the more moving and immersive for it.