This summer’s first critically acclaimed film might just be about two robots falling in love.
It is the 2100s and Earth has surrendered to the mass of waste left by hordes of consuming humans. The planet is so polluted it has become a looming landscape of trashy ziggurats. To survive man has to look through outer space for a domicile while the earth is cleaned by waste allocation load lifters.
After several centuries the only load lifter working is a sentient robot Wall-E, who has a roach for company.
Circumstances change for the better for these lonely hearts when a sexy extraterrestrial vegetation evaluator, Eve, visits Earth. Wall-E knows he has to have some female love and so goes around wooing her. The endearing romance serves as the engine of the film.
“Wall-E” could be divided into two halves. The first part is more along the lines of the last man on earth, “I am Legend” style. The comedy here is situational featuring numerous gags. In one, Wall-E discovers a wedding ring in a case, but tosses it away and keeps the case.
The second part is made up of Wall-E’s time in space. Smitten, he follows Eve to her mother-ship where he engages in subversive activities: Wall-E rescues her when she is marked for termination, releases a bunch of imprisoned robots and also aids the ship’s captain in resisting mutiny of machines. If the first part proceeded at a crawl, this part speeds with blazing saddles.
“Wall-E” is technically proficient, especially in its animation and sound effects. The drawings are beautiful: Action occurs in both the foreground and background; the forsaken Earth is rendered in drab sepia tones, indicating a lack of life.
Ultimately, it all amounted to a film I could admire, but could not love. The ecological substructure supporting “Wall-E” distracted me from the screen magic, revealing the magician pulling the strings.
While almost everyone condemned M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” for what was considered its supercilious air and its unfettered green Messianism, most people see it fit to pass up on this film’s heavy-handed environmentalism.
The confluence of big business and government was not even treated right.
“Wall-E” tries to connect an evil corporation, Buy n Large, with the mess on Earth and the subsequent trip to space. This link fails because the society in space looks more communist than capitalist.
A better film in this regard is Mike Judges’s “Idiocracy”. The connection between waste, which comes from unrestrained consumption, business and government, was more striking. The government survived on the patronage of a monopolistic company, as did the population which needed the company for employment.
By giving its robots the attention normally reserved for human and by treating its humans as robots, “Wall-E” is a Pixar film that comes off as a brutally efficient work of art which nonetheless lacks for warmth. We would be better served if director Andrew Stanton returned to the innocence and simplicity of his previous picture “Finding Nemo.”
Wanted
British actor James McAvoy, fresh from his stint as Keira Knightley’s pleb admirer in “Atonement,” returns in his first blockbuster action flick “Wanted.”
Loosely based on a graphic novel, “Wanted” also marks the Hollywood debut of Kazakh director Timur Bekmambetov.
The film concerns an accounts manager, Wesley Gibson. Gibson describes in a voiceover several quotidian details about his life: He has a co-worker who sleeps with Gibson’s girlfriend, a chocolate donut-addicted shrew for a boss, etc.
In short, Gibson is like us – the overworked and insignificant great unwashed.
By a twist of fate, which only happens in films like these, Gibson gets drafted by Her Hotness Angelina Jolie into an ancient organization of assassins known as the Fraternity. He is then told that his unknown father was a member of the frat club, until he was offed by a rogue called Cross. To avenge his father’s death, Gibson is trained by the Fraternity to curve bullets, endure physical pain under torture (no waterboarding scene, though), look at Jolie’s behind and shoot the wrappers off juicy lollipops.
“Wanted” is not a mediocre action film by any means, but it is a rather nasty and immature one.
It features some terrific, taut action sequences. The first kill scene is a delightful graft of fluid
camerawork and over-the-top executions. In his famous “Daywatch” and “Nightwatch” films, Bekmambetov showed he could be in choreographing action, which is all “Wanted” has.
“Wanted” is indecent in its crass disregard for human and an apparent willingness to ululate in its own bloodlust. Like other contemporary action flicks, it obeys the nihilistic injunction of mere mayhem for its own sake. It typifies the belief that no life, except those of the major characters, is safe in the downhill slide to the credits.
It also displays an immaturity in its filmmaking. Voiceover narration is simply lazy work when all it does is describe scenes. McAvoy’s description of his dreary life could have been excised without a loss of understanding for the audience. And I could have done without his faux accent.
“Wanted” is a decent, campy action film that confuses pistols for hard-ons and serves notice that Bekmambetov is the newest member in the Bay-Bruckheimer clique.
—-Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]