Wall-E

[Alex]

Your taking my thoughts too seriously, just as you seem to feel I am being too serious in having them.

Of course the fact that something isn't shown doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I'm not saying each of these things needed to be explained in the movie or that they couldn't be reasonably explained. They're just things I wondered about while watching the movie. It presented a world different from mine so I naturally start to wonder how it all hangs together; I don't require the questions be answered but that doesn't stop me from thinking about them (and in this regard I did respond to it just as I do to any decent science fiction story).

I also find it interesting to consider the questions of whether some apparent inconsistency exists because the filmmaker never considered it, because they didn't care, or because they thought it made for a better movie that way. Andrew Stanton and dozens of writers and animators lived with this for years, I'm curious as to how they expanded this universe even if it doesn't end up in the movie. And if inconsistencies are left in because they feel it makes a better movie then I can respect that completely.

However

I think the demonstration that small objects have anti-grav and large objects don't fits fine with common sense film language physics.

They did show large objects having anti-gravity. The Axion had a comprehensive gravity field (even in parts of the ship where no human would ever go) and it was much larger than the ship that carried Eve to Earth. Anti-gravity would just be turning whatever creates that upside down.

And:

but the probe ship was not ... that doesn't necessarily mean the probe ship travelled at sub-light speeds.

Except there was a montage of the probe ship passing various landmarks on its way to the Axion. So either it didn't use FTL or it was constantly turning it on an off for purposes of a montage. With FTL how would you end up running your fingers through the rings of Saturn.


Yes, it is a science fiction movie. Just one that didn't particularly care about being a science fiction movie. We'll just have to disagree on how well the "humanity's return" part of the story contributed to the whole. For me was more distraction and filler than help to the story. Add another 10-15 minutes (and WALL-E is already somewhat short by recent Pixar standards) and it could have been fleshed out into a good b-line.

Of course, it is all subjective