I finally saw WALL-E tonight. It’s the highest-rated film of 2008 so far, and it’s stupid.
The plot is thin, unlike the humans, and the payoff is too family-friendly. It’s almost like this film was made for children. WALL-E saves the day, gets the “girl” (robot), etc. In the future, Earth is so filled with garbage that humanity leaves Earth on giant space cruise ships, while WALL-E and the rest of the garbage-bots clean the planet. Humanity never comes back.
The first act of the movie was fine. WALL-E went about his programming day in and day out forever for no reason. Then, he meets the “love interest”, EVE, and they save the day. The end.
My improved version
One of the reasons 2001: A Space Odyssey endures as a classic is its difficult, vague, open-ended plot, and because the illuminati killed Kubrick for making that documentary about their Satanic sex orgies, but that’s a different topic. In a nutshell, it sort of had to do with death and rebirth, and that’s great.
So, in my attempt to turn WALL-E into a brilliant sci-fi epic, WALL-E and EVE get to humanity’s cruise ship, but all they find are scores of robots “living” out the same lives WALL-E has back on Earth: silently following their pre-programmed routines day in and day out forever. Since the ship was meant to be away for only a few years, all of humanity went extinct centuries ago. Now, the only memories of humanity are encoded into the ship’s computer.
WALL-E has brought along a single living plant which he found back on Earth, proving that life can continue there. WALL-E, EVE, and the rest of the robots they meet during their adventure exploring the ship face off against the ship’s computer, Auto, which has been programmed never to return to Earth under any circumstance. Because it is programmed, it’s not really evil, but it serves as the film’s villain. Auto is WALL-E‘s HAL-9000.
The robots find a way to deactivate the computer and take control of the ship, then set it on a course to Earth. WALL-E is damaged from the fight with the ship’s computer and in bad shape. As soon as the ship gets to Earth, EVE rushes to get WALL-E repaired, but the damage is presumably too extensive, and WALL-E powers down. The robots are able to use a fail-safe mechanism built into the ship that begins terraforming the planet—and he ship is destroyed in the process, and with it, any memory of humanity’s existence.
Thus, the crew of robots are left on Earth, and as centuries pass, life begins anew, with the robots as the stewards of the new Earth. In an ending the film hinted at, but didn’t go through with, EVE finally finds the parts to repair WALL-E, but with his memory erased, WALL-E becomes the mindless automaton he was originally, and continues his pre-programmed tasks. The film ends as it began, except instead of WALL-E roaming towers of refuse, we now see a beautiful prehistoric world.
There we have it: the extinction of humanity, a hero’s self-sacrifice, and the rebirth of life. That’s all WALL-E needed to be a good movie for children.