Wall-E

[LSPoorEeyorick]

Originally Posted by Alex

If the planet wasn't evacuated, where are the signs of 6+ billion corpses among all the trash?

Oh, simple... they use CALL-E - she's the Corpse Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class.

[innerSpaceman]

Well, I thought of it as a science fiction film in the way that Star Wars is generally considered a sci fi film. It's much more a throwback swashbuckler, but since it takes place in an off-Earth world of another galaxy, it's "automatically" sci fi, too.

As is Wall-E. Sure, it's of other genres more primarily. But I didn't feel the human story was tacked on. It was the McGuffin and was no more tacked on nor less explored in depth than any classic McGuffin.

It was given more weight than a good many McGuffin, so it veered very nicely into sci fi territory. McGuffin plot was sci fi, and the main characters were all robots. Hmm, yes, love story or not ... this was a science fiction film.

And perhaps I'm giving it too much free parking because it was animated, but I think Alex is also overanalyzing its improbabilities.


* * ** *
* Just because a movie doesn't show something does not mean it doesn't exist. If the Axiom was shown traveling faster than light to return to Earth, but the probe ship was not ... that doesn't necessarily mean the probe ship travelled at sub-light speeds. In fact, since that's clearly an impossible journey, the fact that they didn't speficially show the light speed portion of that journey means nothing (to me, at least).

* Yes, chemical propulsion was a stupid way to have a giant ship arrive and depart from earth. But it looks so cool. I suppose that's why the Enterprise had shuttle craft and transporters ... but by the time of Voyager, they made sure to land the entire freaking spaceship on some planets because it was irresistibly awesome not to.

We don't know squat about the details of Eve's anti-gravity. Perhaps it only works on small objects, and would be inefficiant and perhaps impossible for very large objects. Who the frell knows? But just because they didn't stop for a disertation does not mean they didn't have a plausible explanation. I think the demonstration that small objects have anti-grav and large objects don't fits fine with common sense film language physics.

* Maybe I missed it, but who said Earth was evacuated? I think G.Delight was right that there were more than one escape ship ... but I never got the notion that the ships held all 7 billion people on the planet. That's just dumb.

* And again, just because they didn't show the other ships meet with disaster or whatever happened to them whereever they are. Maybe there'll be a spin-off tv series about each of those.

* Similarly, even if the 7 billion skeletons haven't decomposed, not showing them doesn't mean they don't exist. It sorta makes sense (to me) that bio disposal would be one of the first jobs, completed over 600 years ago.

* Kevy already explained about the videotape.

* As for Eve's directive or capabilities, who's to say that the robots were not repurposed, or new ones built, or new programming done for new tasks, or robots - especially spacefaring ones - having many capabilities quite apart from fullfilling their prime directive.

* Yeah, Saturn's rings. Ya got me.

* Ok, very little oxygen on the Earth. Hopefully, all the humans asphyxiate 10 minutes after the end credits roll. Yeah, I got nothing for that one.

But Eve hardly conducted a massive planet-wide search. Perhaps there are plants in other zones, and seeds blew upon the stormy winds and were placed in the refrigerator by the ghosts of the decendents of Indiana Jones through his Mutt line of heirs.

And while there were no plants to form a food chain in Wall-E's city, perhaps there was an endless supply of twinkies to support a small clan of cockroaches.


* * * * *
I'm sure I missed some of Alex's points, but my free time has expired.

[Gemini Cricket]

The Buy n Large Website

[Cadaverous Pallor]

SPOILERS, people. Looks like the boxes are gone. Those that haven't seen it should probably stop reading the thread now (or rather, have stopped reading it a few posts earlier).















I admit it, the humans "waking up" bugged me. And the fact that they actually wanted to go back to earth bugged me as well. As I said before, the happy-sappy, easy-peasy ending was mandatory, but didn't make a whole lot of sense. I didn't mind though because I knew the rest of the amazing film couldn't have been made by anyone else - and as it had to have a happy kids ending, there we are.

[Kevy Baby]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

And the fact that they actually wanted to go back to earth bugged me as well.

I don't see the issue with wanting to go back. While I cannot totally understand living on a cruise ship for my entire life, and I admit that these people do not have a point of reference for 'something else' (such as Earth), I would think that basic human nature (for an educated person, which I would presume these people are) would want to be somewhere else besides the one and only place they have ever existed. I had presumed that the notion of 'going home' had been passed down from generation to generation in some form, even if the real experience had long ago been lost.

At least that's how I experienced it.

And I did not spoilerize this as at this point, if someone who hasn't seen the movie is still reading, there's not much more damage that can be done.

[€uroMeinke]

I haven't ranked the films yet and Ratatouille and the Incredibles are as biased to me as Cars is to NirvanaMan.

In my mind Tour Guide Barbie was all it took for me to rank TSII over I

I kinda like that in Wall-E you care more about the machines than the people - I find it a smart meta-commentary on the overall theme of the story.

[innerSpaceman]

Yes, you were mostly routing for the insane robots from the cyber-asylum, and only tangentially for the humans because they are us (and they were not presented unsympathetically) in a situation (return to Earth after exile) we were naturally routing for as Earthlings.

As such, I didn't mind that the humans (other than the captain) were cyphers ... and appreciated that a story from the robots' point of view would have the robots be the main heroes ... and the main villains.


I don't even have a problem with the black plot holes of deep space. Artificial gravity probably takes a lot of energy. So they don't have full earth gravity, they have, perhaps, moon-level gravity. And the gravity generator can have issues, so when the ship goes off kilter at a time when the grav is having issues for drama sake (just as all good SciFi technology does), the humans fall Poseidon-Adventure style to one edge of the giant cruise ship.

Yeah, they don't get hurt from the pile-up. D'uh, they're marshmallow people with no skeletons.



Oh, and they're cartoons.

[Gemini Cricket]

I don't know. Do you think it would have been kinda grim to show dead bodies scattered about while Wall-E and Eve make out robot style? I guess it's no worse than seeing the dead hanging rats in Ratatouille...

[Alex]

Yeah, it would have been grim.

I just gave the two possibilities because I assumed the entire planet was evacuated but Lani thought the Axion was the only ship out there. Either option brought to mind consequences unseen in the movie (not that they should have been seen, they were just things brought to mind).

[Ghoulish Delight]

I seem to recall that the first video we saw about the evacuation indicated multiple ships, with the Axiom being the flagship. But I could be wrong.