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Movie Review 7/2 - Wall•E
Rating: 
Pixar Animation Studios, now fully under the control of Disney and releasing a new movie for the third straight summer, has returned with “Wall•E,” which seems like Pixar’s hardest sell yet for the kiddie audience.
Sure, it’s about a cute, beeping robot, but it’s also set in the post-apocalyptic distant future, and its two main characters speak mostly in noises.
To say the movie, directed by Andrew Stanton, gets off to a slow start is an understatement, but it really gets going in its second act before concluding on a poignant and beautiful note.
The first half of “Wall•E” can best be described as “Star Wars,” only if R2-D2 were the only character. (Wall•E and R2 in fact share a sound designer, Ben Burtt.) The eponymous hero is a robotic trash compactor — an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class — who appears to be, with the exception of a single insect, the last remaining sentient being on Earth. He collects knick-knacks in his little “apartments” while repeatedly watching the same scene of an old VHS tape of “Hello Dolly.”
The movie’s first 40 minutes or so amount to, essentially, a silent film, as Wall•E wanders around, crushes debris into tiny cubes, and builds them into piles the size of skyscrapers.
Things continue this way until a spaceship arrives, and with it, Eve, an “inspector” robot who resembles a discarded iMac accessory from the late ’90s, and, after a bout of robotic hard-to-get, becomes his love interest.
The film’s second, and much more exciting and adventurous, half is set aboard a spaceship, which appears to have taken the entire human race with it.
The spaceship functions as a large, permanent Club Med where everyone rides about in mobile Barca-loungers. Unexplained is how all of humanity got on one spaceship, why it doesn’t appear that any non-Americans are onboard, and whether or not there are others like it.
So, several centuries in the future, humans are fatter, lazier and stupider than ever before, and remain completely helpless until they’re saved by a pair of outsiders who ultimately fall in love.
That movie was already made — in 2005, when it was called “Idiocracy.” But, that satirical comedy, directed by “Beavis & Butt-Head” and “Office Space” creator Mike Judge, was an exercise in cynicism, quickly buried by its studio before gaining a modest, but vocal, audience on DVD. “Wall•E,” on the other hand, is a movie for kids from Pixar, a high-budget blockbuster likely to emerge as a huge hit.
Indeed, the film’s agenda is at times preachy and always unsubtle: We’re all a bunch of fat, lazy idiots whose planet — due to rampant corporate misdeeds and crass consumerism — is crashing down all around us, and we’ve got to do something about it. The merits of this thesis can be debated, but it seems a bit out of place in a movie aimed largely at children.
Still, “Wall•E’s” third act is thrilling, tossing together elements of “Star Wars,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and other classics. Sure, there’s a lot of the standard Pixar formula of all the different heroes taking turns rescuing each other, but it all leads to a beautiful, heart-wrenching ending.
Ultimately, “Wall•E” falls short of the Pixar upper echelon (“Toy Story 2,” “The Incredibles,” “Cars”), but it’s about even with “Ratatouille,” “Monsters, Inc.,” and the original “Toy Story” on the next level.
“Wall•E”
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Starring (voices of) Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver and Fred Willard
Rated PG
My rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
