Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 8 (Wall-E)

Pixar have built their reputation on subtly subverting our assumptions about character building and story construction. Whether they are detailing the existential crisis of a boy’s collection of toys, commenting on energy policy by means of blue collar closet monsters, or telling the story of lifelong love in the few minutes before getting down to the real business of tying balloons to a house so as to float to South America, they reliably swerve where most movies would keep straight.
           
2008’s science fiction parable Wall-E takes place on an Earth that was eventually consolidated and run by a giant Wal-Mart style corporation, which seems a perfectly rational extrapolation of certain characteristics within our cultural trajectory. A few hundred years before the opening of the film the planet was abandoned as uninhabitable due to pollution. Humans boarded life sustaining space ships and a fleet of robots were left behind to do clean up.
             
             
Somewhere along the way the robots all shut down accept for one who persists in his function of collecting, compacting, and stacking trash. A program he supplements with the collecting of objects motivated by a consciousness driven curiosity. All of this information is communicated in the first few minutes of the film in what could be grandly described as a virtuosic cinematic aria.

The grace, economy, and effectiveness with which the elements of the story are put into place without seeming turgid or didactic but instead arising from the action and environment, naturally as we move through and marvel at it, is an example of the finest kind of large scale film making. The first section of the film represents some of the most visually original and staggeringly capable film making I've ever seen. The confidence and seeming ease with which Pixar build the enormous and strange and then populate it with sympathetic beings perhaps reached its height in the first half hour of Wall-E.

      
It is easy to say that humanity dooms its self with its irresponsible use of the planet. And it is in fact said often enough that many people just give up because they feel unequal to the problem or wish to spite those they see as trying to affect their behavior. What makes Wall-E unique in this cacophony of warnings and prognostications is that it takes that trajectory as certain and instead of seeing doom it sees a story. It takes the worst-case scenario as its starting point and finds the humor and beauty that might well follow after. If it bails out with a slightly cheap happy ending through vague convenience it has at least built a large and sympathetic enough world that a generous viewer may well remember the first thirty-minutes and forgive the last five.