WALL-E
WALL-E is a lonely trash compactor, apparently the sole survivor of a massive effort to clean-up on a future Earth, ruined by trash. He collects interesting bits of trash from the long-gone human civilization and is obsessed with the movie Hello Dolly, otherwise he keeps a rigorus schedule of collecting trash, compacting it into cubes, and building towers. Oh, and he dodges windstorms. One day, WALL-E meets EVE, a scout robot sent to earth to look for plant life. WALL-E falls in robot love with EVE. EVE likes WALL-E enough but doesn't understand. WALL-E gives her a plant which causes EVE to clam up and switch into a beacon mode. WALL-E doesn't understand this but takes care of her. When EVE is recalled WALL-E hitches a ride to go after her. WALL-E finds himself on a giant resort ship of humans and their caretaker robots who have fled earth waiting for the clean-up effort to report some positive results. While WALL-E tries to court EVE he uncovers a conspiracy to keep the surviving humans in space indefinitely.
After a long string of great films, WALL-E is probably one of Pixar's worst. Many of the visual details are clever and imaginative but a lot more of them are dumb, but worse, many of it's essential story concepts are also dumb.
Dumb detail: Enormous, trash block sky-scrapers, with nothing but friction and gravity holding them together, somehow survive powerful windstorms (I'll allow that repeated lightning strikes would probably weld chunks of it together).
Dumb detail: EVE's is delivered by a huge rocket ship which lands on Earth, dispatches her via a complicated apparatus, and takes off again. EVE, herself mobile via what appears to be anti-gravity, is picked up by the same mechanism.
In pretty much every science fiction movie I'm asked to overlook some dumbness for the sake of the greater story. I'll usually do this, but not for movies with dumb stories in exchange. WALL-E offers this:
Dumb concept: Human beings who trash planet Earth because of their oblivious consumption are able to sustain the same lifestyle in a space ship, light years away, for hundreds of years.
Dumb concept: After generations of living fat and happy on their spaceship, one human decides they should all return because he doesn't like having the help tell him what to do.
Although really, the captain's pique is one of the most realistic parts of the movie. What got left out is that a week later the captain was stripped of office and the humans all take off again leaving misfit robots to colonize the junkyard planet. If that had happened I'd think much more highly of this movie. If this had been the conclusion, it would have given life to the robot love story which otherwise was hmm, sterile and mechanical.
Other things I dislike about this movie:
I do not share the obsession with Hello Dolly. Unfortunately a scene is used as a emotional theme which grew more ridiculous and annoying with each recurrence. It also seems to miss the point. One scene of hand-holding isn't significant. hundreds of such scenes, in as many different contexts are. But WALL-E has none of these, only this one, and this one, over and over again which makes the theme strike untrue.
The spaceship lean, making everyone fall out of their chairs. I realize this was a act of malice by the autopilot, but Auto seems to do this casually, which contradicts all sane safety considerations for the ship, it's crew and cargo. The ship has gravity, not and not even microgravity, but an artificial gravity equal to a half-g or possibly more. All the humans thwart it with their antigrav chairs, and most of the robots appear exempt. Pretty much all the action scenes depend on it. Why have artificial gravity on a ship if not to protect from unwanted acceleration? (Note to Pixar: if you wanted a free pass from me on this, you should have come up with a better story).
The plant ritual which makes the ship enter recolonization mode and is a plot token. There are probably a dozens dumb things about this at every level of execution, and even more dumb side-effects. The most damning thing about it how it's becomes a hub for dumbing everything down with chase scenes.
I could go on.
Things I liked about this movie:
The space dance.
The John and Mary story was great, and even though woefully underplayed, possibly worth the whole rest of the movie.
The BNL CEO and BNL generally. The BNL bits are hilarious and work well as Verhovenesque satire.
The art history montage of the end credits was beautiful but I noticed they skipped most of the 20th Century. Unfortunately it continues the dumb conclusion of the movie, but it's as beautiful as the space dance.
EVE's obsession with fire goes unexamined. This is presumably symbolic of a desire for passion. But fortunately little is made of it.
Auto's HAL-like insistence on doing things his way.
The design of the Axiom which is taken after the art of the late, great science fiction cover artist John Berkley.