Wall-E **
Andrew Stanton, 2008
US
@ Cinerama
It's weird the way critics fall all over themselves rushing to praise Pixar pictures, like no one else has ever seen them and they must alone champion the cause. Except that everyone is doing the same thing, so...
There's plenty to praise here, especially on the technical side. The attention to visual detail is astonishing, especially the dusty, sun-scorched opening. Much of the time on the ship feels like a re-tread of parts of
Monsters, Inc. but still.
Another point that confuses me is the one where people try to use the presence of some vague, "green" message to give the film greater significance. It's pretty much post-apocalyptic boilerplate ("We filled the Earth with trash, and now we have to leave!") without any direct connection to currently relevant problems, and oddly unconcerned about the ability of the completely disconnected and puerile new inhabitants to actually confront the planet as it is, ie still a total junkheap, just sorted into piles. Odd that the film both lampoons the weak laziness of humankind and at the same time assumes a limitless reserve of pluck and perseverance.
I suspect none of this would matter if people didn't speak of the film in such reverential tones. The kind of creepy guy sitting behind me sounded exactly like the type of Obama partisan who is largely trying to make himself look good by associating with a fairly bland, broadly interpretable, empty brand with a shiny surface and real big bandwagon trailing behind. At least with politics you've got the excuse that with so little to get truly excited about, a possibly genuine opportnunity becomes unbearably exciting. Is that the case if you limit yourself to new Hollywood releases these days?
Perhaps what disturbs me most about the movie (and again, this is based on the suspicion that a lot people are taking this movie extremely seriously) is the way robots are located at the emotional center of the film. You're allowed zero distance from the bizarre and manipulative "love" story between Wall-E* and Eve. By using non-human characters with no place in any sort of relational scheme that could possibly exist, our reaction is based almost entirely on the score and pretty much none at all on the movie making any kind of sense. Most animated films featuring animals are predicated on the notion that what were viewing is pretty much a version of human culture, but with robots, it's as if we're expected to believe that out of nowhere love spawns in the circuitry. I suppose what I'm really trying to get at here is that it seems a bit cheap to endow pretty much indestructible, immortal machines with the emotions of barely pubescent 12-year olds. Not wrong, exactly, or unclever, but perhaps suggestive of a depth or complexity that is very much not there. The fact that the film is at-times awe-inspiring is maybe the only reason to get worked up about any of this.
A selection of terms from Metacritic's page: "honest," "substantial," "high plane of aspiration," "the best American film of the year to date," "Chaplinesque," "enduring classic," "heartfelt"
*The most brilliant piece of cinematic merchandising ever? The logo of the film is facing us directly from the front of the titular robot for the entire movie.
See also:
IMDb |
MetacriticLabels: 2 Stars, 2008, Andrew Stanton, Pixar, US
