Three Cheers for Wall-E
I think the reason I looked forward to this movie so much is because it had aspects of everything I like in a story: 1) consumerism that brought about the end of the world, 2) a lonely robot who has discovered he has emotions, and 3) somebody finding their true purpose after a disappointing life (in this case, 700 years).
And, outer space.
Wall-E was everything I hoped for. While not a perfect movie, any of its flaws are still 10x better than even the best scene from The Happening. It truly is a movie for all ages, and proof that movies don’t need to be gory or profane to be “real,” and it turns out that real-life actors may not be needed, after all.
I won’t do a plot analysis or anything, because if you’re reading this you probably already have read a few, so I’ll just say 4/4 stars and talk about two other things related to the movie.
Fat People In the Future
Apparently a few of today’s fat people are so upset at how they are depicted in the film that they are doing things such as boycotting it and writing angry letters to newspapers. You just have to shake your head and laugh at that. Memo to fat people: the movie has little to do with you.
Sure, the humans depicted in the film are fat, but it’s more than that. If you notice the diagrams presented in the movie, they’ve actually evolved into amorphous blobs with little bone structure, due to an abundance of convenient technology that makes moving around unnecessary. It was inevitable for them. The good news is that if you’re fat and offended by the film, it is not inevitable for you. Get off your ass and move around. Don’t eat that second pizza. (Or at least learn about nutrition enough to realize that skipping breakfast and restricting your calories can make you fat, too.)
Bottom line: being offended at something that “is making fun of” a condition you brought upon yourself is kind of silly.
The Sum of His Parts
[Spoiler warning: if you have not seen the movie, the rest of this article will completely spoil the ending.]
At the end, Wall-E has sacrificed so much for the good of humanity that he is a broken, beaten up hunk of metal who is barely conscious. (Side note: how cute that, even in such a condition, he still extends his hand as best as possible and introduces himself to strangers, “WaaaAAall-EEee.”)
He knows that he will die unless he gets back to Earth where he has collected replacement parts from other Wall-Es, so that he can replace the broken parts and reassemble himself. They get there just as time runs out, and a frantic Eve races to swap out all that bad components, including a motherboard with what must have been flash memory (nerd alert) because there was no hard drive.
This all leads to the heart-breaking scene of Wall-E rebooting with no memory. Instead, he simply has his prime directive and continues collecting trash with no emotion. Then his love, Eve, approaches him and says her goodbyes, leaning in for a robot-kiss, at which point Wall-E’s memory is restored.
But restored from where? As we saw when she presses his play button, there is nothing but static. His memory banks are empty. She replaced so much of him that he is essentially a new robot. But somehow he remembers anyway.
This could have happened for three reasons: 1) a “magic” happily-ever-after ending for a kids movie, written with no other thought than that. 2) Their first kiss from earlier in the movie somehow imprinted “Wall-E” onto Eve’s hardware, and by “kissing” him she unknowingly transferred him back, or 3) robots have officially become more than just a sum of their parts, and it didn’t matter if he had a new leg, arm, eye, processor—whatever—because the being that is “Wall-E” exists outside of those parts and in the instant his memory was restored, he was touched by the hand of God. Wall-E is the first of God’s new children, the saviors of the planet who bring humanity back to Earth (watch the story told throughout the end credits) to start a Garden (of pizza plants!) with an apple tree that sprouted from an old boot.
So I found it very fitting that his companion’s name was Eve.
