Movie Review: Wall E

Before you say anything I know I am getting sloppy with my movie reviews. Like The Dark Knight I am reviewing this one almost a week after seeing it. I swear I will try to improve that record. Anyway, here goes.

This is Pixar's best movie to date and that is saying something. It's not only a cartoon, it's also a science fiction, comedy, love story, and silent movie all rolled into one. And it is absolutely charming.

The first half hour of this movie is just breathtaking. Wall E is the last robot on earth (the whole thing is quite apocalyptic) and humans evacuated the planet 700 years earlier as a result of the level of garbage on the planet rendering it completely unlivable and deemed so by the Head of State and large corporation Buy 'n Large. Wall E is one of thousands of robots built to compress, within his "stomach", and stack the garbage into piles that rival skyscrapers in size. Watching him go through his daily routine of compacting, building, searching for spare parts and watching Hello Dolly with his little cockroach friend kind of reminded me of old Buster Keaton silent movies where emotion and comedy were portrayed purely by body language and antics.

As the Axiom, the ship built by Buy 'N Large to house humans during the "5 years" it would take to clean up Earth, comes back 700 years later it leaves Eve, a robot whose directive is to find life. Here the movie becomes a love story as Wall E falls in love and when Eve gets called back to the mother ship Wall E must follow.

The movie loses a bit when it introduces the glutinous humans who can do nothing more than sit on chairs, eat and get taxied everywhere in a climate controlled sunny and 72 degree (hey, just like LA!) weather. It's the goal of the captain to return to earth and rebuild life there. Needless to say Wall E runs into some turmoil getting Eve but the animation scene with Eve and Wall E dancing in space outside the Axiom is fantastic.

I'm not giving away much by saying they get back to Earth in the third act but I will say that the culmination of the love story is great. I find it amazing that Pixar consistently develops characters that I become emotionally invested in much more than live action movies with real actors. With every little beep and blip noise Eve and Wall E become more and more lovable.

If you are looking for a quick 90 minute movie that will leave you smiling for a long time after you leave the theater, you can't go wrong with Wall E.

Rating 9/10

A quick aside. There has been way too much commentary from idiots with nothing better to do than justify their life as "political experts" on this movie as some sort of political tool for left wingers or right wingers. I actually saw the movie not so much as an ode to the dangers of Global Warming but just a comment on North America's over consumption. There was no indication at all that Global Warming made Earth unlivable, there was just too much damn garbage piled up. As for the fact that humans were portrayed as fat and docile, well yeah a lot of them are and this movie was just trying to have fun with that fact.

If anything I saw this movie as more a right wing commentary. The reason Earth was in such bad shape was because of a large, statist government, Buy 'N Large, that was responsible for supplying the populace everything they needed. And ultimately Earth was recolonized based on conservative staples as farming and the strength of the nuclear family.

But really I like to believe the creators who have said the movie has no agenda at all and just wanted to tell the story of the last robot on Earth.