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WALL-E Movie Review |
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Posted on
2:00 p.m. PST July 1, 2008 |
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff
06/27/2008
Watch movie trailer at bottom of the movie review.
Daring 'WALL-E' is a family film with a cautionary
message that even parents can love
With "WALL-E," Pixar at last takes the great leap forward
many of us knew the company had in it. A "family movie" in
name and MPAA rating only, it's a major visionary work, a
sci-fi
 parable of astonishing scope and depth that is
anchored by an adorable bucket of bolts and yoked to a
sensibility that is - there's no other word for it -
furious. It's also, by a substantial margin, the best
American film of the year to date.
The accomplishment of director Andrew Stanton, his
co-writers Pete Docter and Jim Reardon, and the artists and
computer jockeys who work under Pixar majordomo John
Lasseter can be gauged by the disturbing awe we feel at the
trash-choked disaster man has made of his home planet.
"WALL-E" begins on a ravaged Earth centuries in the future;
humans have long since fled in cruise-line spaceships,
leaving behind small robots with sad, binocular eyes to
sweep up the mess. These are called Waste Allocation Load
Lifters, Earth-class - WALL-Es for short - and there appears
to be only one left in working order.
As you'd expect, he's lonely. WALL-E spends his days
compacting detritus into cubes and piling them up; early on,
we realize with a start that what seem to be skyscrapers are
in fact towering ziggurats of our leftover junk. At night,
WALL-E puzzles over his keepsakes - a Rubik's Cube, a rubber
duck - and watches a videotape of the 1969 musical "Hello,
Dolly!," obsessively returning to the Michael Crawford love
song "Out There." (He's not a Streisand fan, I guess.)
These scenes are stunning in their wide-screen attention to
detail and their refusal to let us off the hook. While there
is a standard Disney sidekick critter, it's a cockroach;
surprisingly cute, but still, a cockroach. The first act of
"WALL-E" is, daringly, a post-apocalyptic silent movie that
picks up where the last act of "AI: Artificial Intelligence"
left off.
What keeps us from hanging ourselves in the theater? Two
things: WALL-E himself - he's an ingeniously designed pip,
with a timid curiosity and a comically stalwart sense of
duty - and the arrival of EVE, a gleaming white probe from
the BnL Corp.'s cruiseship far out in space. Her name stands
for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, and she's
looking for plants - evidence that Earth is ready for
recolonization. By chance, WALL-E has just turned one up, a
delicate shoot he's repotted into a shoe.
So this is what Pixar is asking us to buy into: a romance
between two robots. Because it is Pixar, bringing wit and
intelligence to kiddie CGI fare that usually has none, the
task turns out to be unexpectedly easy.
"WALL-E" picks up speed when the little guy follows his
girlfriend back to the spaceship and the film becomes a more
familiarly rambunctious action-adventure story. Again,
though, there's magic in the swooping design of the
interiors - Pixar just thinks bigger and more elegantly than
anyone else - and the comic variations on robot servants. (I
especially liked M-O, an anal-retentive sweeper-bot that
freaks out at the sight of dirt.)
Where are the people? They're here, and after 700 years of
being waited on hand and foot by domestic machines, they've
grown pear-shaped and indolent, unable to get to their
atrophied feet for lack of bone mass. If anything, this is
more frightening than the scenes back on Earth, a goofy but
ferocious attack on a consumer culture that turns leisure
into religion and humans into overfed sheep.
The machines, by contrast, are superior in every way to the
people they ostensibly serve: smarter, faster, more alive.
Even the human captain (voiced by Jeff Garlin) is under the
sway of Auto, the piloting system that takes the form of a
ship's wheel with an angry red HAL 9000 eye in its center.
The captain wants to head back to Earth. Auto, acting on
outdated directives, intends to destroy the plant and keep
the ship floating through space forever. Against him (it?)
are EVE and WALL-E, now labeled "rogue robots" and volleying
through the ship in open rebellion.
"WALL-E" takes the fizzy, frenetic action-comedy of previous
Pixar releases and places it in a bigger setting, visually
and philosophically. The movie's a consistent delight but
you never lose sight of the stakes involved; when the ship
tilts off its gravitational axis and the humans pile up
against the windows like fat, flopping tuna fish, the image
makes you laugh and inhale in horror at the same time.
Stanton and company appear to have been studying the work of
Japanese animation guru Hayao Miyazaki; while his spiritual
dimension is missing, the eco-despair that galvanizes his
films "Princess Mononoke" and "Nausicaa of the Valley of the
Wind" is even more keenly felt here.
Everything clicks on the micro level too, from Thomas
Newman's exuberant score to the slapstick comedy of the
malfunctioning repair-shop bots that assist the heroes
(they're lunatics taking over the asylum). Pleasingly,
"WALL-E" is aware of its cinematic roots: Aside from the
"2001" references, the title character's cozy metallic
speech comes courtesy of Ben Burtt, the sound designer who
previously provided the voices of R2-D2, Chewbacca, and E.T.
It's he who gives us the soul in this new machine.
The end result is, in one of Lasseter's pet phrases, a work
of genuine "soopa-genius," but are audiences ready for it?
"WALL-E" is an assault on much that we hold dear: our
throwaway lifestyle, the belief that high-tech narcosis is
our just reward, our corporations and politics (Fred Willard
appears in ancient video footage as BnL's "global CEO,"
vainly urging us to "stay the course"). The mirror it holds
up is not a flattering one.
In other words, can you take the kids? The movie's dense by
"Finding Nemo" standards, but of course you can, and should.
Expect the little ones to be entertained while the larger
themes lodge subcutaneously; expect older kids to marvel and
be a little saddened and want to have long discussions on
the ride home. Expect some adults to be scared silly, others
to be confused, still others to clap their hands with joy at
a toy story that dares to say things our grown-up movies
don't. The nagging, almost misanthropic vision at the core
of "WALL-E" may ultimately cause it to be Pixar's most
admired movie rather than its most well-loved. For now, it's
simply the best.
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Original Review Link |
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