FINAL ASSIGNMENT MOVIE REVIEW

WALL-E

Staring : Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver, John Ratzenberger

Director : Andrew Stanton

WALL·E It’s sweet, clever, funny, and visually stunning. WALL·E (an acronym for Waste Allocator Load Lifter – Earth Class) is the last robot standing in what appears to be futuristic. The human race left hundreds of years ago, but WALL·E continues to do his job, building skyscrapers of compacted trash and collecting random knick knacks that he finds amusing. One day a giant ship arrives and unleashes a sleek little probe named EVE. WALL·E is smitten with her and offers her his knick knacks to impress her, but regrets the move when she sees the plant he found growing in a pile of junk. EVE, per her directive, confiscates the plant and calls the ship back to retrieve her. Desperate not to lose her, WALL·E hitches a ride on the ship and lands on the Axiom, the mother ship of the Buy ‘n Large Corporation. Once the ship’s captain learns of the plant’s existence, he wants to return the ship back to Earth. His robotic crew, however, has other plans.

Most of the technical praise that “WALL·E” will receive will be for the visuals – and it deserves every accolade it receives – but the sound work is flat-out astounding. WALL·E and EVE say little more than their names and each other’s names, and the rest of the robots, with the exception of the Captain’s slightly menacing assistant, do not speak. However, the gibberish sounds they make cover the entire spectrum of human emotion, and you can understand exactly what they’re saying and feeling. For those who were nervous about the movie’s supposed lack of dialogue, fear not. As for the visuals, well, here is all you need to know. The scene of WALL·E and EVE dancing in space, not to wallow in hyperbole, is poetic.

Pity, then, that the part of the plot involving the humans proves to be more liability than asset. While there is a valid point in their attempts to show that technology makes people lazy, the absurd lengths that they take this point do not feel genuine to the rest of the story. As for Buy ‘n Large owning everything from grocery stores to interstellar cruise ships to the government, well, that’s blunt force trauma with the message stick in comparison to the rest of Pixar’s work, and it diminishes the script’s finer details, namely references to the work of both Rankin & Bass and “Galaxy Quest.”

“WALL·E” has a soul. I suppose that is a message in itself, but after the bits about the environment, technology and the dangers of corporations wielding too much power, I chose to focus on the positive, and there are lots of positives on which to focus.

By Aloysius Setyo W (2201408004)