WALL•E (Dir: Andrew Stanton, 2008).
Combining futurist sci-fi and robot rom-com with a timely ecological message, this 9th feature film from Pixar Animation Studios released by Walt Disney Pictures opens on post-apocalyptic Earth 700 years after humans mass consumerism and neglectful waste management has made the planet uninhabitable. Here trash compactor robot WALL•E, the last of his kind, stoically continues a clean-up operation. Enter Eve, a reconnaissance bot dispatched from starliner Axiom to recover life forms and asses suitability for a possible return of humans to the planet. On discovering a solitary plant sample Eve is summoned by the Axiom pursued by WALL•E. A burgeoning bot romance ensues on their quest to deliver the sapling to the Axiom’s Captain and initiate a return to Earth.
From its opening scenes of an eerie, trash-strewn abandoned Earth to its awe-inspiring space-scapes, the movie is a visual delight. With a titular character who is largely mute, the screenplay by director Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon is a masterclass in how to tell a moving, thought provoking story with minimal dialogue. Its comments on consumerism, big business, political corruption and the human destruction of Earth are even more pertinent now than when the movie was released a decade ago.
Despite its serious message WALL•E is an utterly joyful, uplifting viewing experience and is refreshing in the entirety uncynical, optimistic approach to its subject.
In 2016 a poll of international critics conducted by BBC Culture voted WALL•E the 29th greatest film of the 21st Century. With this I would disagree, this modern masterpiece is arguably the greatest movie of the century and one of the greatest movies of all time.
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