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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 69.61%
Worth A Look: 14.71%
Average: 5.88%
Pretty Bad: 6.86%
Total Crap: 2.94%
6 reviews, 66 user ratings
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| WALL•E |
by Lybarger
"You can’t say no to those big metallic eyes."
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It’s been such a lousy year for romantic comedies that the only engaging one features a pair of robots.“WALL*E” might be another Pixar cartoon (that’s about like lamenting a portrait is yet another Rembrandt painting), but its metal characters are so endearing and vivid that they make the people in most live action films seem inanimate in comparison.
The title character is a lone cyborg who is essentially an artificially intelligent trash compactor. While that’s most of what a Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class (WALL*E) is designed to do, the designation shortchanges him.
He takes breaks from mashing up trash into blocks to collect any object that strikes him as interesting, and he’s smart and ingenious enough to repair himself.
This might explain why he’s still around after all the humans have left the earth ages before and why he’s the only robot still functioning. As he goes through his rounds, there are dozens of fellow WALL*Es who are now little more than statues.
The only company he encounters is a cockroach. If the setup sounds morose or even dull, you probably haven’t been following the work of Pixar. Writer-director Andrew Stanton gave the studio “Finding Nemo,” its biggest commercial hit, so it’s interesting that he’s now created its most audacious movie to date.
There is no dialogue during the about the first 30 minutes of the film, but the charm of its title character makes the loneliness seem curiously engaging. Stanton and his co-writers Pete Docter and Jim Reardon drop all sorts of subtle hints at how WALL*E has come to be the only intelligent being on the planet. WALL*E also has wonderfully expressive eyes and body language, so he’s already a more able romantic lead than Ashton Kutcher.
In addition, “Star Wars” sound designer Ben Burtt has come up with a cornucopia of audio effects that easily make up for the sparse vocabulary of title character. Burtt even performs some of the characters’ voices.
While the movie might visually resemble “Blade Runner,” Stanton and his crew imbue it with a warped sense of whimsy. WALL*E constantly watches a “Hello Dolly” videotape he’s rescued from the rubble and tries to imitate it. The only glitch is that he can’t find another robot to hold his hand or dance with him like the figures on the screen.
That ends when a mysterious cyborg named Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator or EVE (Elissa Knight) lands near WALL*E’s home. Although her slick appearance makes the rusty WALL*E look shabby, she gradually lets down her guard and stops firing lasers at him. She becomes especially affectionate when he presents her with a tiny plant he’s found during his digging.
It turns out that both machines are part of a larger plan to save the planet after it has been ravaged by consumerism, pollution and human error. Stanton and his cohorts have created a frequently amusing dystopia where couch potato lifestyles and willful ignorance have reduced humanity to a sadly ineffectual bunch.
Stanton and his crew poke fun at alarming current trends (pollution, obesity, etc.) but never resort to proselytizing the audience. It also helps that the few humans who do appear in the film are painted affectionately. The captain (voiced by Jeff Garlin from “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) of the vessel that holds humanity’s last remnants might be appallingly ignorant, but he learns with astonishing speed.
Still the most likeable characters are the bots. The writers of “27 Dresses,” “Made of Honor,” “Sex and the City” and “What Happens in Vegas” should be forced to watch this film “Clockwork Orange”-style. Maybe then they’ll create characters who are interesting and likable.
While Pixar has gradually become the studio that has yet to release a lousy film, I still have some quibbles. While the casting of Sigourney Weaver as a malevolent computer is a nice nod to her work in “Alien,” her voice is so heavily disguised that listeners can’t recognize it. It seems silly to cast a star when the performer’s voice is buried in the mix.“WALL*E” dares to challenge viewers by trusting them to pay attention to what’s on screen. Because so much of it is told visually, you can’t leave for a long popcorn break and expect to grasp the story. Perhaps by trusting their audience, the folks at Pixar have proved that neither they nor their viewers lack heart or brain.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=17264&reviewer=382
originally posted: 06/28/08 06:53:30
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USA
27-Jun-2008 (G)
DVD: 18-Nov-2008
UK
N/A
Australia
27-Jun-2008
DVD: 18-Nov-2008
![[trailer]](/images/icon/trailericon.gif) Trailer
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