Weighing in on "Wall-E"

It's an ok movie. It isn't great, and the social commentary that everyone seems to think it provides is undone in the credits. At best this is a love story done in CG.

You have a lonely guy, a very lonely guy named Wall-E. He's a robot, the last of his kind. He lives by scavenging parts from his deceased kin. He is tireless in his duty, but he longs for companionship. That companionship arrives in the form of a slick, but evil looking robot named Eva. Yeah, it's cool that she was designed by the same guy that designed the iPhone, BUT, she's evil. Sleek, dark faced, and very little to offer in the way of emotional feedback. Despite this, she turns out to be the true love of Wall-E after the predictable choosing of her duty over love that she has never felt.

Meanwhile, people got fat. That's good because aside from the group that did the Final Fantasy movie, no one has figured out that we can't CG normal humans and have people buy into it. Anyway, our tubby ancestors forget all of their American ideals - freedom, creativity, and love. But this isn't commentary on how technology makes us lazy. In the movie they explain that "space" is the cause for the change in physicality.

So the bad guys get zapped, the misfits help out, and the guy gets the girl, and the credits role as the humans are setting foot on earth, less educated than when they left and read to "grow some pizza". The credits then show stills of the humans returning to their old shapes, and their old ways. Reliving our own history, rebuilding the same things that led to our trash-filled downfall. The stills do not depict the use of solar or wind power, they don't show people recycling right from the get-go, they don't show people who live in harmony with nature as the animals did.

They show exactly what we want to see, that our way of life can be maintained, they pander to us, they roll over. They have no backbone to make the statement people so desperately want them to be saying. It's just another movie.