Posted on July 10th, 2008 by Colin
12 Comments »
I saw Wall-E yesterday. It’s making me question by general contempt for recent Pixar/Dreamworks productions, which I generally find to be lazy slapstick comedies that try to teach lazy, sentimental values that lack any real thought or analysis. I was told that it’s a truly emo movie (it was) where Wall-E sits around watching old movies and pining for a love he’s never had. Considering I love anything that might bring a tear to my eye and involves wimpy male characters, I agreed to see it. And I have to say it was super cute and I didn’t think it was all bad. I (srsly) almost cried at a couple points.
Erin: how was wall e?
should i go see it?
me: omg
you would love it
i actually cried out “oh no” in a high pitched voice at one point
really loudly when I was too involved in the action
Erin: yesssssss
me: even though I have a lot of criticisms
it’s super cute and fun
like, REALLY cute
it’s majorly an erin movie
you will be obsessed after you see it
omg, it’s so cute
plus there are obese people who learn to live again
And now for the criticisms and these include numerous spoiler alerts.
- I think Wall-E may promote abusive relationships. Through the entirety of the movie Eva treat Wall-E like total crap but he still comes begging back. She’s a career driven bitch who cares nothing about Wall-E and only about her “directive.” By the end of the movie, he convinces her to beleive in their love, but I find something about her sea change of emotions totally unbelievable. The message in this movie is kind of like an abused woman that if she could only love her husband/boyfriend enough he would stop hitting her and show his love in return.
- I love that the obese people learn to live again and re-colonize earth and all, but I have a really hard time understanding how their softened, roly-poly bodies are able to adapt to both full gravity and the harsh wind and lightening storms on planet earth. A proper epilogue should show them all dying of starvation and disease 5 years later. I’m not sure I was really rooting for them to return to earth since it would obviously lead to their eventual destruction.
- This last criticism is the way I feel about all Dreamworks/Pixar films and why I secretly tend to bar myself from seeing their movies in the theaters. There were several serious moments that they then ruin with slapstick comedy. The best example is when there’s this darkly romantic moment between Eva and Wall-E where they are watching these giant tankers burn on a barren landscape. The directors/producers immediately ruin this moment, which could be amazing had they stuck with the stillness and solemnity of the moment, by having Wall-E engage in some slapstick physical comedy trying to flirt with Eva. It’s retarded. Come on guys, this is a serious topic, I mean, there is a mass of floating bags the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean right now, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and we shouldn’t be laughing about it.
Anyways, I totes recomend Wall-E as a fun date movie or something. Whatever. I’m so depressed now thinking about all the plastic in our oceans. I’m going to go suffocate myself in a plastic bag. Have fun at the movie.
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July 10th, 2008 at 10:45 am
THIS IS LIKE THE THIRD TIME I’VE POSTED A COMMENT THAT WAS LONGER THAN THE ORIGINAL BLOG POST IN A BLOG I NEVER COMMENT ON TO DEFEND WALL-E.
1: It wasn’t that Eva just didn’t love him and then she came around to loving him, it was that Wall-E was the last creature in the universe to still carry on the idea of ‘love’. It’s implied that he developed an atypical pattern in his learning AI, that caused him to be fascinated with the way things work, which apparently taught him to recycle himself and college trinkets, and resulted in him trying to emulate the affection he saw in Hello Dolly.
The robots aren’t inherently programmed know the idea of love, and EVE was a robot, following her directive. Wall-E would’ve loved ANYTHING seemingly sentient. If you watch the movie again, he extends his hand to the cockroach in the first scene, and the cockroach, not knowing this gesture, jumps over his hand and crawls up his arm. Then, when he follows the red dot on EVE’s probe, when he finally ‘catches’ it, he tries extending his hand to the laser pointer dot. Wall-E just wanted something to hold his hand, and the (indeterminate amount of time) that EVE spent in sleep mode as her ship returned was enough for him to decide that EVE would be that hand-holder. I loved how he completely ignored all the other EVE units, even though they all looked the same.
ALSO, in EVE’s defense, EVE stands for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, and her directive is apparently to go to other planets and try to find vegetation, so, her trigger happiness is apparently a self defense mechanism? Like, literally? Not that she’s an aggressive bitch but she literally needs to defend her self from aliens and shit?
ALSO, about her unbelievably falling for him–when she first meets Wall-E you see her face ‘flick’ through several different languages, which are presumably modes, which may or may not affect her personality? When she sees Wall-E and the plant blow up, her face flicks similarly (and she says “…no…”) and her personality is different from that point on. I mean, when you think about it, the plant was her directive, and she saw the plant (and Wall-E) blow up, and she suddenly lost (both?) her directive(s), and it caused her to flip out. ALSO, immediately after, when she ‘kisses’ Wall-E, a spark travels between them, which (spoilers?) you later see again, and it is implied to be some kind of data back up. So, Wall-E was INSIDE her from that point on, which may have also influenced her personality 180.
2: This one is easy–they could ween themselves of the Axiom for centuries. I’m sure SOME of the Axiom’s facilities were dependent on it being in space, but not all of them. When the captain boots up the control panel one of the faculties mentioned as regenerative food supply system. So, it’s not like they crash landed and lost the Axiom functionality, they still had food-in-a-cup until they could get the farming thing down.
3: Okay, yeah, this bothered me a LITTLE bit, but I also think it’s a problem of the accessibility of the movie. I did think “aw darn they blew a chance to make EVE look all sad and introverted about the destruction of the earth, and instead opted on jokingly furthering her and Wall-E’s relationship.” but on the second viewing, this bothered me less. EVE never showed any sort of sentimental longing for the earth (ESPECIALLY in the awesome garbage chute scene where she seems to not care about it emotionally, outside of it being her directive) so that would’ve been kind of out of place in the context of the rest of the movie, plus it’s sort of more important to further Wall-E’s affection for her than it is to build her as a character, since her lack-of-character pre-change was kind of important. So. Yeah.
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July 10th, 2008 at 10:59 am
i wish for this fantasy movie to become america’s fate. الحمد لله!
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Vagenius reply on July 10, 2008:
Too late, Mahmoud! We’re halfway there!
BTW, welcome to Social Crisis. Are you a self-effacing homo?
Mahmoud reply on July 11, 2008:
HOMOS? HOMOS! IN my country, الحمد لله there are no self-effacing homos, only party people, partttay people!!!
July 10th, 2008 at 11:21 am
The Pixar folks demonstrate an amazing amount of insenstivity in portraying all the humans as shockingly obese “do-nothings” who spend their days laying on hovering lounge chairs, sucking on sugary slurpy drinks while watching TV and being waited on hand-and-foot by robots. As soon as this part of the story began playing out, I immediately wondered how any heavy-set people in the theater must be feeling. Even worse, how might any overweight children in the theater be feeling about this obviously negative portrayal. Pixar tries to suggest in one throw-away moment that the people are fat because they have been in space so long and lost some bone density, but the much clearer message is that they are chunky because they are lazy and eat too much (and several times the characters’ large size is used for visual jokes). A clear sign that Pixar recognized the nastiness of their message is that they chose not insult their target audience: kids. There are no children, let alone overweight children, at all on the ship — we see only babies and chubby adults. [And good luck finding images of any of the chubby characters in Disney's advertising for the film or the film's official website.]
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ken reply on July 10, 2008:
a good point to bring up is that there were hardly any mixed race or colored humans left on the axiom. (i believe one black couple were spotted in the whole movie) did pixar ethnic cleanse the future?
peter reply on July 10, 2008:
Oh good Lord, when can a movie JUST BE A DAMNED MOVIE? My son wants to see this movie but maybe now I won’t take him for it will turn his little 11 year old mind into a flaming liberal. LOLOLOL Not.
hannah reply on July 15, 2008:
i just wrote a really long response about the portrayal of the fatties, and then decided to not even bother, because i haven’t seen the movie, and talking about the fats is tiring anyway.
yawn, where’s my slurpy?
July 10th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I was more disturbed by the fact that there were seemingly NO plants on Earth. How the fuck did the Axiom passengers breathe when they got off the ship? I mean, I know it’s a little too depressing for a children’s movie to end with all the humans dying, but seriously!
Also, how did that damn plant grow in a refrigerator with no sun?
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Fist Patrick reply on July 11, 2008:
right! also, they take the plant into space and hand it off during that romantic romp in zero gravity with the fire extinguisher. That plant would have died there, exploding from the lack of pressure.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
ALL YOU FAGGOTS DIE !!!!
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BruceLD reply on May 14, 2009:
Ummm. Yes, all faggots will die eventually. So will all heterosexuals, bisexuals and lesbians. In fact, so will every living thing on this planet. But everything will be born again, including faggots, heteros, bi’s and lesbian. That’s nature for you.
So there. Get over it.