Liz told me I’d like Wall-E, that it is cute. So I went yesterday, having run out of other summer blockbusters (none of which I’ve written about because it is simply NOT the best season). Although I found it ingenius and entertaining for the whole family (there were lots of tots there), I also found it disturbing.
There we were in a theater full of mostly overweight people sipping on their giant drinks, watching a movie about trash having made the world inhabitable and people of the future sipping on giant drinks in reclining chairs watching their own personal screens. It was eery. It reminded me of watching Cars, also by Pixar Animation Studios, from my room at a motel in southern Colorado. I say “from” because the movie was showing at the drive-in theater next to the motel and the rooms were wired with speakers. I’ll always remember the scene of cars at the drive-in theater watching a movie of cars at a drive-in theater. Only that was memorable, not disturbing.
The obvious message of Academy Award-winning writer-director Andrew Stanton, that humankind will be undone by their own trash because of excessive consumerism, is too close to the truth. Whether the young children of today watching this movie will relate it to their lives of Happy Meals and individually-wrapped everything is questionable, though. I heard a lot of laughter from parents as they munched on their jumbo tubs of popcorn.
Oh, did I mention that the people of the future were living in a space cruise ship far far away, waiting for the day that Earth would welcome them home? Did I mention they were fat, really fat, beyond obese fat? When we got to that part of the movie, I stopped eating my popcorn (which was a medium shared with my spouse) and was glad I had ordered only a small drink. But I felt guilty that I would need to discard my popcorn container and drink cup at the end of the movie.
I think I was disturbed, though, because my generation is used to end-of-the-world movies that involve atomic bombs or creatures from outer space. Those things we don’t have a lot of control over, even if we elect a president who is less likely to push the button should another country not behave the way we want them to. But we do have the opportunity now to make sure our planet doesn’t get further poisoned by our need to have more and more and easier and easier lives.
Growing landfills are only one of our problems. Our air, while we snuff out smokers in bars and casinos, is only becoming worse. Here in Denver we have ozone alerts weekly in the summer and a nasty brown cloud half the winter. But if you think it is just a problem in big cities or China, remember that China’s air pollution has actually traveled and been visible as far as the Rocky Mountains. But for every finger we point at the Chinese, there are three pointing back at us. We in the United States are the biggest consumers. It’s time we start thinking about what life will be like for the little kids watching Wall-E today if we don’t change our ways. (One way is rather than demanding more gas so the price will go down is to use less and thus pollute less.)
Other than the fact that I saw the horrible truth in a movie mostly meant to entertain, I give Wall-E a High Five and will recommend it for my two-year-old granddaughter.
