Wall-E movie review. Proof I’m mad.

Wall-E scored 96% in the Rotten Tomatoes site - with 208 good to 8 bad reviews.

Imagine what its like to feel almost totally alone in a world where everyone else has gone off in a different direction. I know how Wall-E must have felt, bless him.

These days, it has become fashionable to love everything new, shiny and CGI - particularly if it purports to have some important, timely message for us. Anybody who doesn’t love it (the mass hysteria goes) hasn’t got a heart.

Ah well. That’s me branded then.

I watched Wall-E with a desperate hope that - given no dialogue for 30 minutes, and given our ‘prowess’ in computer animation - I’d at least be treated to a visual spectacle worth sitting still for.

What I got - from the clumsily out of place opening music to the grating anthropocentricity of Wall-E and his attachment to cute objects - was another piece of Hollywood trapped in the cycle of media obsession and self-referencing that turned me off King Kong in as short a time.

I know everyone else in the human race loves Wall-E. I don’t. Given that CGI not only gives you the chance to create breathtaking worlds of the imagination but breathtaking ways of people and things interacting, did we get either? No. We got a world that was more of the same in every sense. And we got emotional gestures and interactions that were depressingly - maddeningly - familiar and tired.

Hollywood is trapped in its own limited range of ideas and gestures. Draw a gun, Eve! They do it in every movie! Blow things up, Eve! You just gotta.

CGI seems to have fooled everyone into thinking that you just change the skin of a movie and Presto! A new story.

I summed up my review for Wall-E in a text to a friend:

“Don’t worry, kids, we’re all going to get incredibly fat but then good technology is going to come along and save us from bad”

End. Ah, well. I suppose I’ll just roll back into my container with my bits and bobs, then.

January 6, 2009 | Filed Under review 

Comments

Leave a Reply