Movie o' the day: WALL-E

Again, yes, I'm slow about getting to movies in the theater... but warm summer days and a lack of air conditioning in my house combine nicely to motivate me. WALL-E was my choice for the day.

I got to the theater just a bit late, so I didn't catch the entire introductory cartoon... just enough to see that I really, really want to see it in its entirety sometime (stage magic meets Portal, with a cute bunny... what's not to like?). The movie itself... the darker, more cynical side of me desperately wants to label it "Looking for love? Live a hermitile existence for several hundred years, cannibalizing your brethren to survive, latch onto the first being remotely like you and stalk her beyond the ends of the Earth, and love is assured", but that's the same part that calls Princess Mononke "A lovely story of demonic possession", so we'll leave it lay.

Honestly, WALL-E is a wonderful story, all the more so for being told with limited dialog, especially in the early parts. Trash collector WALL-E, the last(?) functioning unit of his kind, continues his assigned task of cleaning up the Earth that humanity despoiled and fled... but, over a few hundred years, he's developed a few quirks, including his collecting habit and his pretty-well-indestructible pet cockroach that eats Twinkies. One day, a probe ship comes and drops off EV, an explorer robot that searches the wreckage for something, but has an itchy trigger finger. The fearless roach ends up getting the two bots together and surviving the process... and it turns out that WALL-E has what EV's looking for, while he's showing her the collection of "neat stuff" that he's found... which results in EV's collecting the item and shutting down.

Undaunted, WALL-E watches over EV while continuing his job... until the probe ship returns and snatches her away. WALL-E hitches a ride on the probe ship to the cruise ship, where his pursuit of EV ends up disrupting the routines of robot and human alike... and that's all the further I'm going to say in any great detail about the movie. Apart from the love story angle, there are two other overriding statements from the film... first is the prevalence of "BuyNLarge", Wal-Mart on steroids (think "global CEO" as a presidential sort of position), and the message on that is glaringly obvious. The second is the role of routine and duty in life, a topic that hits close to home for me, as I do tend to define myself by what I do. The "good" characters invariably honor their directives while they're "working, up to the point that doing so might be injurious to others... the "bad" characters obey their directives at all costs, even if the directive is sloppily provided, outdated, and contradicted by current information, often because by doing so they retain power.

Of course, this is definitely a "suspension of disbelief" kind of movie... especially for somebody technically-minded like myself, it's all too easy to poke at the weak corners and find flaws that take the film out of the realm of science fiction and straight into fantasy (the quick example: humans that spend their lives in microgravity chairs ever being able to stand upright?). Resist that urge, go with the flow of the movie, and you'll have a fun, and maybe even touching, experience of it.