“WALL·E” (2008)
It’s a beautiful movie that kids will want to watch over and over again, and I have no intention of slipping into the role of contrarian. ”A triumphant mix of ‘2001’, ‘Idiocracy’ and ‘An American Tail’,” says John Gruber of The Philadelphia Daring Fireball, which he didn’t really say but you would get the joke if you were on Twitter although you probably still wouldn’t find it amusing.
That said, via Matt Haughey comes a review by Michael Ian Black (who, as it turns out, was once professionally scorned by the movie’s director, Andrew Stanton). MIB has this to say of the problematic love interest, EVE:
Then there is the love story, which centers around our hero Wall-E and his psycho enviromentalist girlfriend Eve. Eve is on a mission to find photosynthetic life on Earth. But she is also extremely trigger happy with her laser pistol, which raises a logic problem. What does Eve expect to find that necessitates killing? The only thing it (she) can kill is something that’s alive. The only things that are alive require some sort of food. For any species that would present any kind of threat to Eve to survive on a dead planet for seven hundred years, it would need a regenerative food source. That food source could only be plant-based, which implies photosynthesis. Therefore any proof of large life on the planet is proof of photosynthesis. She shouldn’t have to kill anything. She merely needs to record that life exists. So why is she hovering around shooting everything that moves? And why does our hero Wall-E fall for this psycopath? Is it the old “only if you were the last laser-wielding hoverbot on Earth” scenario? If that’s the case, so be it, but God forbid he forgets to leave the toilet seat down one night.
While I was definitely swept up in the romance, something about EVE’s physical design (apparently the work of Apple’s Jonathan Ive, correct me if I’m wrong) was a little unsettling to me in her android sexualization. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my anthropomorphosized sex objects with a little more baddonk and upstairs baddonk. Which would be tits, I guess.
I exchanged the following couple of observations with a friend and because I’m so often in the habit of quoting myself, I’ll share:
Friend: …I just bought it completely. The only part that worried me was the embedded eco-socio-political polemic, but the filmmakers managed to make it seem germane to the story, for the most part. I think the movie’s childish, pre-verbal conception of romance speaks to me in binary code.
Me: I think it’s gonna make kids grow up to be adults who want to fuck robots (which will by that time, of course, be not only possible, but accepted).
Friend: EVE could be a vibrator without much modification.
And that said, gotta love those soft Appley subsurface LEDs. If you’re into that sort of thing.
