Review: WALL-E


Set in a 29th century Earth seemingly abandoned by humanity and visually resembling something like a giant junkyard, this is the story of the title robot (voiced by Ben Burtt, a “Star Wars” sound design whiz) who gets awful lonely all by himself. Then one day he happens upon a more modernised robot named Eve, and they are fast friends. However, their relationship hits a dead stop all of a sudden, as the ship Eve came from has come to pick her up. Wall-E manages to hitch onto the ship, and what he discovers you will have to see for yourself.

 

Oh, am I ever gonna catch hell for this, but here we go nonetheless. If not the worst Disney/Pixar film to date (and it probably is), this 2008 Andrew Stanton (“Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”, the rather dull “A Bug’s Life”) animated flick is certainly the most tedious. Although I know many people love it, I think this one’s best left to snooty critics who will dig its “Short Circuit” and “ET” done by Godfrey Reggio (“Koyaanisqatsi”) vibe. As for me, I kinda dug the visuals, but that’s about it. It’s certainly no “Monsters, Inc.” or “Finding Nemo”, that’s for damn sure.

 

The colour scheme is a bit monochromatic, but the burnt-out copper/brown look to most of the film is admittedly beautiful in its own way. ***** MILD SPOILER ALERT ***** It’s pretty nicely textured CG animation, as well, though as with a lot of these things the human animation is rubbery, blobby, cartoony-type stuff that doesn’t really mesh with the more realistic images throughout the rest of the film. ***** END MILD SPOILER ***** The characters certainly didn’t grab me. If the title character was meant to hold my interest for 90 minutes or so, making his visage a mixture of “ET” and Johnny 5 (crossed with a bulldozer) was the wrong way to go about ingratiating him to me. It’s a little on the nose, to be honest, and I bet focus groups were involved in development. He’s nauseatingly cutesy and marketable, yet incredibly bland and one-note at the same time. His voice, meanwhile, gets nails-on-a-chalkboard unbearable very quickly (This from the man responsible for R2D2’s charming beeping and chirping). This thing is so cloyingly cutesy that 20 minutes in and I felt a sugar-related vomitous (Google tells me it’s a word, so AutoCorrect can go fuck itself) feeling inside me mixed with crushing boredom. Then another cutesy robot turns up looking like a cross between Marvin the Martian and an iMac, and my eyes were rolling so far into the back of my head that I was scared they’d get stuck there. So you’ve got two robots, what do you get them to do in the film? Oh, you have one show the other a bunch of cool pop culture stuff and 20th century toys/artefacts, of course. Right…sigh.

 

I guess it’s an interesting idea to make a kids movie set in a Dystopian/post-apocalyptic future, but for me this just wasn’t done well at all. If you can connect with the title character, you’ll probably like it. The lack of dialogue for much of the film probably helps give it a bit of cross-cultural appeal. It just didn’t appeal to me. For me, I was never drawn in because I could see the cynical process that went into creating the character: Toy merchandising! Once that happened, I was kept at arm’s length to the film’s frankly minimalist story and (forgive me) mechanical characters. It bored me to tears.

 

Fuck this movie (And before you call me up on the language, remember that philosopher Billy Connolly asserts that there’s no such thing as bad language, only bad use of good language!). It’s cynical, pandering, calculated, Happy Meal bullshit that not even quality animation can redeem. This could’ve been quite imaginative and interesting, but it isn’t and I hated it. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of shit I have ever seen. There you go, that’s your quote right there. The ludicrously Oscar-nominated screenplay is by Stanton and Jim Reardon (an alum of “The Simpsons”, who also worked on the story for the much better “Wreck-It Ralph”), from a story by Stanton and Pete Docter (co-director of the overrated “Up”). Maybe “Turbo” wasn’t so bad after all…

 

Rating: D

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