Wall-E
Movie · 2008 · Reviewed on
In equal parts, an adventure and an abstract masterpiece.
I watched Wall E only once before. I didn’t recall much going into this re-watch. The parts that I do remember still are the best parts of the movie.
The first act of this film serves as such an achievement in wordless storytelling. The movie opens on this wasteland of a world we once called home. Destroyed by greed and consumption. A world so uninhabitable that the only thing to do is to leave. Within this world, a single solitary robot working away, compacting the world’s garbage into towers as tall as the skyscrapers that once created them.
There’s such a deep existential loneliness in this sequence for me. Wall-E aches for connection, and so the only thing that comes close is to reach out to the best of humanity’s past. Music, movies, toys, lightbulbs, odd bits and bobs decorate their home. Their shelter becomes a shrine to what we lost. Humanity’s ingenuity, craftiness and love for each other. They stare at a song sequence from a Gene Kelly musical longing for the same connection.
This movie gets to me man.
Pixar at its best, doesn’t write for children. Pixar writes for the inner child within all of us. The one that wonders at the stars. The one that loves. The one that believes that humanity is fundamentally good, no matter how much it may have lost its way.
We’re quickly accelerating towards a future not too dissimilar from the future Wall-E paints. The world is being burned from the inside out and we can only stare from the sidelines. The only message Wall-E can give us is that even in desolation… there’s hope however small. Someday, despite everything, life will keep yearning to live, and to love.
God, what a movie.
