I get it: I’m fat. I pollute the environment. I’m a terrible person and I should be killed for my sins against the planet. In fact, I would rather be killed for my sins than ever have to sit through Wall-E again. Pixar is known for grinding out the sentimental equivalent of sausage, unremarkable and barely digestible. But while they’ve mostly manipulated audiences with obtuse stories of cowardly fish and moronic superheroes, their approach with Wall-E is to guilt audiences into hating themselves; taking a cue from Happy Feet, it seeks to torture children by telling them that their mere existence makes the world worse.
Wall-E prays to God for a better movie.
Of course, this guilt trip that will force countless children into years of therapy is cloaked behind an utterly pointless love story between fancy toasters. The title character, the last trash compacter left on Earth (thrilling, I know), is the equivalent of the kid with down-syndrome that everyone hopes will leave them alone. He is obsessed with the movie Hello Dolly!, a tool used by director Andrew Stanton to show the audience a different movie as a means of distracting us from how terrible this one is. It doesn’t work. Then he meets Eve, a bitch of such magnitude that she makes Hillary Clinton look like Mother Theresa. They go on an adventure so monumentally boring that you’ll thank Stanton for keeping the dialogue to a minimum as it will make the experience easier to sleep through. But there is nothing remotely tolerable about this movie, especially when it beats you over the head with its message. Unsurprisingly for Pixar, that happens to be the entire time, so you might not survive the concussion you get if you risk sitting through Wall-E.
Posted by Tom Houseman 