Entertaiment

I really wasn’t interested in seeing WALL-E .  Pixar has a tradition of making great movies, of course, but for me, personally, the movie had – and has – several strikes against it going in.

First, I don’t like movies that have machines that fall in love, with each other or with people.  Computers (and therefore robots) do what they’re programmed to do.

I accept the human characteristics in Asimov’s robot novels precisely because he gives them a brain that functions more or less organically.  But the robots in WALL-E are, so far as we know, direct descendants of our current digital computers.

“Personality” in such computers exists only as a programmed simulation; there is no reason why emotions should have been programmed into a robot garbage compacter.

(And don’t write to me about “Jane” in my own novels Speaker for the Dead , Xenocide , and Children of the Mind – if you think her example applies, you haven’t read the last two books.)

Second, I generally dislike stupid science fiction movies, which includes almost all of them.  I don’t like it when the science is stupid.  I don’t like it when the technology is stupid.  And I don’t like it when the society depicted in the movie is stupid.

Experience has made me so extremely skeptical of science fiction movies that I assume going in that they are going to be stupid in every way.

Now, add to that the license that animators generally take with the rules of reality, and what chance, really, did WALL-E have?  Almost none, for a skeptical adult like me.

Every single dreaded attribute of bad sci-fi films, WALL-E has.

And I still had a wonderful time watching it.  I recommend it highly.  Pay no attention to the rest of my review.

Because I can’t stop myself.  I have to pick apart the absolute nonsense in this movie.  Start with the fact that the story is about machines in love.  Why, of all the identical robots that we’re actually shown, were these two the only ones to develop emotional bonds?

To their credit, the writer/director, Andrew Stanton, at least addressed the question.  At the beginning of the movie we see WALL-E going about his endless job, resourcefully refurbishing himself from time to time with spare parts cannibalized from broken down copies of the same machine.

This part of the film is, in my opinion, the most powerful film depiction of loneliness that I’ve ever seen.  If it had done nothing else right, WALL-E would be worth seeing just for the time span before “Eve,” the other robot, arrives.

In his loneliness, WALL-E has taken to watching the movie Hello, Dolly! over and over again.  The filmmakers were merciful: They only showed us bits of two numbers: “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment.”

(These numbers involve a very young and silly-voiced Michael Crawford as Cornelius, Danny Lockin as Barnaby, and Marianne McAndrew as Irene Molloy.  We do not have to watch any portion of any scene containing Barbra Streisand.  Much as I love Streisand’s voice, Hello Dolly! was not her finest hour.  If I’d had to watch any of her numbers over and over and over during this movie, I would have needed serious therapy.)

We see WALL-E using a hubcap to imitate the straw hat bits in “Sunday Clothes” and we get the idea: WALL-E see, WALL-E do.  Therefore, it is “logical” that he also wants to imitate the love scene involved with “It Only Takes a Moment,” complete with hand-holding.

Later, Eve gets to see the same scenes, and comes to get the same message from them as WALL-E.

This means that even though there is still no logical way that such lessons could be internalized by digital computers, at least Stanton showed us a source from which the machines could get the idea of falling in love.  Now the animator’s license (Wile E. Coyote climbs out of the hole his body made when he hit the ground at terminal velocity) applies: I was able to accept the storyline.  I never cared about the robot love story, but at least I didn’t gag while watching it.

The same thing applies to the behavior of the robot bosses on the spaceship – Stanton carefully supplies programmed-in reasons for the autopilot to run amok, and then to be defeated.  The plot still depends on ridiculously bad programming, but since Windows Vista exists in the real world, that clearly is not unbelievable.

I’m not going to enumerate the various impossibilities in the garbage-filled Earth that WALL-E inhabits at the beginning of the movie.  It’s obviously meant as a comic exaggeration of the human propensity toward fouling our own nest.

Besides, it’s nowhere near as dumb as some of the ridiculous anti-science that is actually believed in by groupthink eco-puritans, on the basis of which economy-wrecking treaties and legislation have been proposed.  In fact, during the movie I realized: Eco-puritans are, in fact, living in a cartoon universe.  They should be right at home watching WALL-E .

When we get to the spaceship, the stupid science abounds.  Just a couple of obvious howlers: This spaceship has presumably not landed on any planet in hundreds of years.  Yet it deals with garbage by compacting it, putting it in a huge airlock, and jettisoning it into space – along with whatever air is in the airlock.

You can’t do that in a closed environment.  Very quickly you deplete your air supply and your stores of whatever elements are present in the garbage.  You can grow more food as long as nutrients and light remain, but you can’t grow more oxygen, carbon, or hydrogen, let alone metals, gases, and other elements needed to sustain life.

Then, the funniest dumb mistake: The ship apparently has a system for generating gravity, because it does not rotate to provide a “down” for the passengers.  The gravity generator is presumably located in the bottom of the ship.

So when the navigation goes awry and the ship tilts, the gravity generator still remains in exactly the same position, relative to the rest of the ship.  There is simply no way that, from merely tilting the ship, it would cause people to slide along the deck and bunch up along one edge.

(Something similar could happen if the ship continued to spin in the same direction, and the spin accelerated.  But that’s not what the movie showed happening.)

If WALL-E has so much dumb science, why do I recommend it?

Because it’s a terrific human story.

I didn’t care about robot love.  But I did care about the human society on the ship – the two passengers who became real people to us, and the ship’s captain.  Together, they represented the human victims of human stupidity (of which, as said before, there is never a shortage), and what made this film inspiring was the way that their resourcefulness and will-to-survive, not to mention joie-de-vivre, found their way to the surface.

The robots are the catalyst for change, but it is the human characters whose achievements I cared about, and human beings who triumph in the end.

I never switched off my brain – I knew there was dumb stuff, but I also knew that for the big things, Stanton was trying to make the movie less dumb than it could have been.  And when it came to human desires and achievements, he got it right – he showed us good people doing good.

Oh, and did I mention that the movie is also funny?  This is the same guy who directed and co-wrote Finding Nemo , and who also co-wrote A Bug’s Life , Monsters, Inc. , and Toy Story 1 and 2.  He knows funny.

And here’s when I decided I didn’t just like, but loved this movie.

(Spoiler alert – not that there’s all that much suspense.)

At the end, when the people return to Earth on the strength of having located exactly one feeble little plant, I couldn’t help but think: These obese, feeble-boned people are doomed to die of starvation.

Stanton thought of that, too.  So he showed us that the plant they found wasn’t the only plant that existed.  And then, during the end credits, we were shown the whole progress of the humans’ effort to recolonize Earth.

Not only that, but each stage was animated in artistic styles echoing human history.  First cave paintings, then Egyptian art, and so on up to Van Gogh.

(Again, as with Hello Dolly! , we were spared having to endure what would have been unendurable in this context: No cubism, no abstract.)

Is WALL-E the best of the Pixar movies?  No, not by a long way – that would be Finding Nemo or Ratatouille .  But it’s a good movie, which is more than I expected from the promos, and way more than most studios have offered us so far this summer.