(2008) A shabby, solar-powered trash-compactor robot WALL-E (voiced by Ben Burtt, though mostly making clicking sounds, whirs and whizzes, whistles, humming, and a few words) with big eyes (reminding me of Woody Allen), tractor treads, and a pair of limbs with grips, has been left behind on the abandoned planet following a global garbage epidemic.

With only a cockroach for companionship, WALL-E has a built-in recording device on which he can play music; he watches a VCR tape of Hello Dolly. Inside a trailer he takes refuge during severe dust storms, stores the interesting stuff he finds, and keeps spare parts.

An amazing CGI animation from Disney/Pixar, directed by Andrew Stanton, who shared responsibility for the story and screenplay as well, is at times overwhelming and tedious (especially when the action shifts away from Earth).

One day WALL-E discovers a living plant inside an old refrigerator he opens with his cutting torch. A spacecraft lands, deposits a gleaming white probe, and departs. EVE (Elissa Knight, who has a limited but larger vocabulary), an acronym for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, looking somewhat like an egg with blue eyes, flies or floats; her laser weapons are devastatingly powerful.

Following the cockroach's approach, EVE and WALL-E become friends; he shows her his collection, including the plant, which she immediately confiscates (her directive), secreting it inside her casing. The spacecraft returns, retrieves EVE, and with WALL-E clinging to the outside blasts back into space on its way to the Axiom mothership.

Up to this point I was reminded of Legend with Will Smith and his dog on an otherwise deserted (so he believed) planet; similarly both movies lost their appeal for me during the second half.

For 700 years after escaping from the toxic atmosphere of Earth in 2110, the human survivors have been aboard the BNL (Buy n Large) spaceship: their every need provided for by service bots such that everyone has grown obese since they no longer ambulate. Along with loss of bone and brain density, these porky people appear to have little intimate contact with one another. (Apparently they don't even reproduce naturally, using artificial means.)

EVE is the first probe to return with a positive (living) specimen, which if verified would activate Operation Recolonize. However, the plant suddenly disappears, leading to a false alarm (suggestive of EVE's having a false pregnancy). WALL-E (a continual source of "foreign contamination") follows EVE to the Repair Ward, where he releases the malfunctioning machines, who become rogue robots.

When the green plant inside an old boot reappears and the captain (Jeff Gavlin) attempts to manually take control of the spaceship from Auto (like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey) to make a return to Earth, the autopilot (asserting that "life is unsustainable on Earth") blocks the effort.

Fred Willard has the role of BNL's CEO Shelby Forthright while Sigourney Weaver's voice is the Axiom's computer. "Down to Earth" by Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman (the score's composer) accompanies the end credits.

I would have preferred WALL-E and EVE's going back to Earth alone to raise their plant, watching it evolve into a new global garden without people. The corpulent cartoonish creatures so long confined inside their Pillsbury pressured cylinder don't deserve a happy revival.

(The two short features on the DVD, Presto - the hilarious antics of a hungry rabbit with a magician - and Burn-E - a humorous take on the events ongoing inside and around the Axiom seen from the perspective of a peripheral welder robot - are well worth watching.)

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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