Review
WALL-E: Good but Not Great
By Steve Friedman
Jul 3, 2008

WALL-E is a fairly good movie, but not a great one. There is much about the film that is simply amazing, but it also has one huge flaw that holds it back from reaching its potential. I walked out of the theater feeling somehow empty.

First, I’ll talk about what’s great. This is one of the best looking animated films of all time. The world created on the screen is beautiful.

The rendering is so photorealistic that they include some scenes of live action video, and it’s not jarring at all. The images of real people fit right in with the artificial world.

The movie also creates a fascinating universe. In fact, it creates two fascinating universes, both of which are incredibly compelling. First, there’s the desolation of the abandoned Earth overrun by garbage. Second, there’s the world of the space-cruise liner where everything is run by robots and all the people on board have forgotten what it means to be human.

Either one of these would be a science-fiction writer’s dream. The fact that they manage to do something like that twice is very impressive.

Now the not bad: Some people have complained about the political message, bleak worldview, and misanthropic ideals behind this film. I say those complaints are way off-base.

The only political message is that we shouldn’t pollute the earth to the point that it becomes uninhabitable, which is obvious enough that even the most ardent anti-environmentalist would agree. You could argue that the movie is claiming such an outcome is likely given our present course, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

The movie presents a vision of the future, not the vision of the future. Pixar isn’t saying we’re going to render the Earth uninhabitable any more than they were saying that toys all come to life when nobody’s looking or that monsters harness children’s screams as a source of energy.

It’s just a fairy tale. You could choose to view it as making a statement, but you have to actually choose to do so. (The same is true of the idea that one corporation will end up running the world.)

As to the idea of humanity becoming fat lazy incompetent man-blobs, that isn’t nearly as misanthropic as it would seem on a superficial level. The thing is, in the world of WALL-E, all of humanity is basically in prison. It’s a white-collar luxury prison, but it’s still a prison. They can never leave the cruise ship, they know they’ll be trapped for their entire life, and they know nothing is going to change. Just as nothing has changed for 700 years.

I suspect the inspiration for the second half of the movie was that a writer was on a cruise, and thought, “Wouldn’t it be terrible is your entire life was like this?”

There’s nothing wrong with using a question like that as a jumping-off point. In fact, I’ve written a screenplay that was originally inspired by a very similar question. (Mine was, “Wouldn’t it be terrible if the entire world was like Disneyland?”) It’s not a misanthropic point of view, and it’s certainly not trying to say people would become fat lazy incompetent floating blobs if they could.

Every single person in WALL-E is depressed by humanity’s eternal prison sentence. If you’ve ever been seriously depressed or known someone who was seriously depressed, you’ll recognize the symptoms.

They believe nothing they do will have any impact — which is correct for the people in WALL-E — so they don’t bother doing anything. They overeat, won’t get off the couch, avoid interacting with other people, and stick to a routine even though it’s a routine they hate.

As an outsider it’s easy to recognize the depressed person’s behavior only makes him more depressed. He may even objectively agree. But he can’t work up the energy to do anything differently.

The movie makes it very clear that the people are bored and unhappy with the state of things. When they’re shaken out of their routine and given the opportunity to learn, do, and see things, interact with other people, and recolonize the world, every single person is excited.

Showing people being excited over the things that make us human reflects a fundamentally positive view of humanity, not a negative one. So the people who view the movie as misanthropic are flat-out wrong.

There was one big problem I had with the movie: The character of WALL-E itself. Or rather, the non-character.

WALL-E only possesses animal-level intelligence. It’s cute, and we can root for it and feel sorry for it, just like we could if we were watching a puppy. But we can’t identify with it. It’s rare for a story to succeed with a protagonist that’s too simpleminded for the audience to identify with, and I don’t think WALL-E pulls it off.

WALL-E and EVE

Look at movies that are about animals. Excluding the ones where the animals talk or act with far more than animal intelligence, and the movies where the protagonist is a human interacting with animals, there aren’t a whole lot of films left. I can’t think of any examples, though I’m sure there are some that exist.

The lack of an intelligent central character could be overcome by a strong and clear enough external goal, but WALL-E lacks this. WALL-E has a very vague goal: To be with EVE. But there isn’t really a definition of success or failure in this.

Without a strong enough character or external plot to carry the story, the only thing left is the setting. The setting is incredibly strong, but that’s not enough by itself to make the movie a satisfying experience.

The film that WALL-E most resembled to me was Forrest Gump, and I think it failed to quite work for the same reasons. Now, Forrest Gump made 2/3 of a billion dollars and won the Oscar for Best Picture, so it was certainly a commercial and critical success.

But looking back at it, does anyone really care about that movie? If you were asked to describe what Forrest Gump was about, your response would be something like, “Uh, there’s this mentally disabled guy who can run fast. And he stumbles his way into the background of a bunch of important events. And he loves this obnoxious hippie that has contempt for him, but then she dies of AIDS and gives him a son.”

That’s not a story. That’s just a bunch of stuff that happens to someone you don’t identify with and only care about in the way you care about a puppy.

WALL-E is a much better movie than Forrest Gump. Forrest Gump was carried by cutesy revisionist history, which is far less interesting than the beautifully desolate fascinating world created in WALL-E. But WALL-E is still just a non-character stumbling through a series of events.

Steve Friedman has an MFA in screenwriting from USC, and has written ten feature-length screenplays.  He blogs regularly at Nifty McNiftington.