Movie Review: Wall-E

Wall-E = Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class. It's also a very good movie. Most of the reviews I read about the movie have marked it as 3 1/2 stars or better (out of 4). I took all three of my children (a very remarkable thing, considering the price of movie tickets these days), ranging from my almost-9-year-old to my 3-year-old, and they all were absolutely enthralled. I was, too. The movie started off beautifully illustrating a lonely Earth with just one last, surviving robot.

This little robot, in it's solitude, had developed strategies for survival that were clever, but unsustainable in the very long run (using spare parts from it's broken peers only works until they run out ...). His solitude is rudely interrupted by a far more advanced visitor, to whom he quickly gets emotionally attached. Needless to say, soon Wall-E is far from home and finds himself in all sorts of wacky situations.

My favorite scenes involved a beautifully-rendered and emotionally-moving "dance" scene in space between Wall-E and another robot, and another scene which made me laugh out loud involving a "medical ward" for broken robots. While the movie did introduce humans with, shall we say, certain physical deficiencies, I was very pleased that the creators of the movie chose not to portray them as either stupid or inept; they could have played a much heavier hand with the themes of human laziness and short-sightedness, but didn't, and that was notable.

We stayed through to the end of the credits, and that was worth it. I discovered that the creators of the movie had help from my place of business -- I'm assuming it was either to realistically design the robots, and/or to get the astrodynamics right. Either way, as an extraordinarily nerdy engineer with an eye for finding flaws of that nature in movies, I was duly impressed and nothing stood out that detracted from the story. The movie wasn't entirely kid-centric (as Pixar films usually aren't) and there were plenty of funny little quirks that only adults would get (and some others that only nerdy engineers would get).

Indeed, I really want to see it again (and probably again, and again) so that I can look for more hidden gems and more closely watch the eye-candy in the backgrounds. We will definitely be buying it when it comes out on DVD. All in all, I give it a good 4 star rating (out of 4) -- a very fine G-rated film that the whole family can enjoy (mine did!).