Theological Tuesdays: WALL●E and Wanted

This is my first post of this nature so I'll briefly explain it. Every Tuesday I play to write up a post that discusses the thoughts, ideas and themes behind one or two films. I will generally default to the theatrical release I see but if don't have one on a given week I'll pick the one I think has the most worth talking about. I won't go into extreme depth but I'll assume you've seen the film and I will be spoiling the films, often including their endings. So if you haven't seen the films I've talked about I'd probably steer clear of these posts. That being said lets dive right into it.

Spoiler Alert: Major plot points of WALL●E will be discussed in depth.

First off most critics seem to think this is some environmental tale about what happens when people quit caring about the environment as the earth is covered in so much trash that the human races abandons it. Not only do I think this claim is bogus and a result of everyone looking for environmental messages under every rock but also writer/director Andrew Stanton shot down this idea in practically every interview it has come up in. What he said he believes that aspect is about is a cautionary tale of the danger of becoming an overly consumerist society. Furthermore, he says most of what people see as the environmental message rose out of narrative necessity and not idealist beliefs. He needed a reason for the humans to leave the planet and something for WALL●E to clean up. Furthermore, he says he has no intensions of being preachy at all with this film.

Moving on Stanton has said that he believes that at its heart WALL●E is a longing for love and I'm inclined to agree. Romance involving robots in noting new to the sci-fi genre but it generally has taken on more sexual connotations. Here there's no such animalistic approach to love. WALL●E is the last robot on earth in longs for companionship from another robot. He actually first develops this longing from a betamax copy of the musical Hello, Dolly. To him he sees the display of love as holding hands as he watched a pair of lovebirds in the music.

WALL●E also has an interesting social commentary on the advents of modern technology. As we develop better and better technology we run the risk of becoming so complacent and lazy that we become vegetables forced to move around by hoverchair. Also, as we create better ways to communicate with each other but communicate less in what we have to say. Face to face conversations become obsolete when everyone is just a holocall away. Is the film saying that technological advances are bad? No. All it's saying is that we have to be careful how much we rely on that technology before it takes over our very existences. Already we see individuals practically tied to their cell phone as they spend many of their waking hours talking, texting and sending photos.

Spoiler Alert: Major plot points and the ending of Wanted will be discussed in depth.

Fate. This seems to be the core ideology behind Wanted. In the middle of the film Sloan shows Wesley the machine that decides the targets of the organization. It's a giant loom that uses a binary code (yea it's cheesy) to spell out a person's name. It's said fate controls the name the loom spits out in order to achieve a balance in the universe. Understandably Wesley doesn't quite buy into the notion, so much so that he fails to execute his first target. Then Fox tells an effective story about her father being killed by a man whose name came up on the loom weeks before he murdered her father. Convinced by the story Wesley buys into fate and kills his target.

Then comes the twist. It turns out that Sloan's name came up on the loom one day. Wishing to save his own skin Sloan hid the evidence and reconfigured the loom to input names that would benefit him. Fate, it seems, has been twisted and is simply Sloan controlling the machine. The individual's potential to chart their own destiny is the final conclusion of the film. Wesley's character goes from being controlled by his sorry girlfriend, sorry boss and fear to becoming so cool and calculated that he is in control. The film leaves the back door for fate open but ultimately the film concludes fate is a ruse as Wesley takes control of his own life and kills Sloan.

Week in Review: Pixar Studios

If I could only watch one film from one studio each year it would easily be Pixar's yearly release. Charming characters, masterful storytelling and peak animation has always made the studio a hit among kids and adults alike. Critics and households alike are no stranger to Pixar and it's hard to find a household with kids that doesn’t at least own one Pixar film. Many would say, myself included, that Pixar is the only redeeming thing about Disney (although I did enjoy last years Enchanted). We're nearing a decade and a half with Pixar being the leading animation studio and it doesn't look like it will let up anytime soon.

Their ascension to the throne of animation began with a small 1995 film called Toy Story. I actually remember this coming out as a young kid but at the time my family wasn't really into going to the theater so I didn't see it until it came out on VHS. I remember liking it but at the time I was to taken by my Sega Genesis to be really interested in any movie. Revisiting this film I found it more lacking than I though it was. I kind of had already deducted as a kid that the film was trying to tug my heartstrings but it wasn’t until re-watching it that I discovered how. Like I said I really wasn't that interested in movies as a kid and Toy Story didn’t spark any interest in me.

This changed when A Bug's Life came out several years later. I had gotten to the age where most young boys quit watching animated films and move on to solely watching Star Wars and other such PG action flicks. But at the time it was ridiculously hard to find any kind of copy of Star Wars and I would search every store I walked into for years to find the trilogy. But that's a tale for another time. The reason I bring it up is if I owned Star Wars I might have made this leap past animated films. But since I hadn't I still didn't think it was childish to watch animated features. A Bug's Life was the film that sparked my imagination and made me want to see more films from these people. We saw this film in a dollar theater months after everyone I knew had seen it. I'm sure the audio was crap and the video lacking but as a kid you tend to overlook that stuff. It's rather interesting that A Bug's Life is the first film I latched on to because re-watching them it's easily one of my favorites from Pixar.

Sometime around A Bug's Life coming out in theaters I had a sister, which is probably part of the reason why I saw it in the dollar theater. I always had a sister a couple of years younger but she never liked animated films that much beyond say Cinderella or The Little Mermaid. And about the time Toy Story 2 came out in 1999 she was able to carry on a coherent conversation and we took her to this film. She immediately latched onto it and we bought it for her for her birthday on VHS. If you have kids or younger siblings the one thing you know about kids and movies is that often they go through phases of watching the same movie over and over again. For her it was Toy Story 2. Yes, I enjoyed seeing this in the theater but found my sibling's constant watching of it on VHS slightly annoying, so much so that when I sat down and watched this film again I realized it's probably been close to half a decade since I've seen this film in its entirety. It's an animated gem, but like Toy Story I have some issues with it.

Then we move onto Monsters, Inc. I'm not sure what it was about this film but for some reason I really liked it when we checked it out on DVD. Maybe it was Billy Crystal and John Goodman or perhaps it was the simple novelty of owning a DVD. Unless I'm mistaken this was one of the first DVD's we had with a second disk of special features and I diligently watched each one. That being said upon this revisit I didn’t find it quit as good as I remember but still was a lot of fun.

After that Pixar finally gives the director's chair solely to Andrew Stanton in their biggest hit: Finding Nemo. I'll go ahead and say that I think my review is rather crap. Issues with the disk, a Physics test and the fact I couldn’t actually watch the film meant I wasn't writing it in the right frame of mind. That being said it's easily the most powerful of the Pixar films with a real emotional punch. I also really latched onto the humor here more than any other the film. In fact, for several months this film was constantly quoted in my boyscout troop by kids from age 12 to 17. The fact that it could be a hit with the audience most likely to pass by animated films is a real testament to the film's power.

After mainly being lead by people in the company from the early days Pixar gets some fresh blood in the director's chair. Pixar newcomer Brad Bird is no stranger to animation with the critically acclaimed but box-office bomb The Iron Giant under his belt before he came to Pixar. With his first Pixar film, The Incredibles, Brad Bird takes Pixar to the next level in terms of deep, thematic exploration. Furthermore he makes an impeccable action superhero flick for all ages. Pixar at this point already had a great history of excellent storytelling but Brad Bird raises the bar even further with a superhero film that surpasses its live action counterparts.

But alas all good things must come to an end and Pixar breaks their streak of great films with the sub par Cars. I'm sure plenty still like it but at least for me I found a lot that worked against it. Larry the Cable Guy, the crude humor and band narrative were all things that turned me off. Also, the eyes of the cars just didn't work for me. Every other Pixar creation has naturally has had eyes but once they superimpose eyes on the cars I don't think it works at all.

Swiftly moving on we get to a truly ravishing film. Brad Bird's Ratatouille is a masterful and mature achievement. The story of a rat in a kitchen could go wrong in so many places but Bird and the crack team of animators at Pixar poured a lot of charm into their rodent characters and made it all work. But where the film really shines is in the allegory of food as art. The creativity and consumption of art is what the film is really getting at. It's easily one of Pixar's best work and a must see.

We come to it at last, the film that inspired this whole shenanigan. Eight films viewed 7 reviewed in over seven days lead up to this one film. To say Andrew Stanton's WALL●E is an astounding achievement of modern animation may be an understatement. Looking forward I hope a lot of films latch on the new old way WALL●E tells its story primarily through the visuals. I already was expecting another great film going in but still WALL●E totally took me by surprise. It's easily my favorite Pixar film, the best film I've seen this year and just might be the best animated film ever made. Do yourself a favor and see this film. Take the kids. If you don't have kids take someone else's. This might even be a great date movie with its charming romantic story. In any case see it under any circumstance. This is the must see movie of the summer and anyone who lets it slip them by will be missing some of the greatest movie magic to reach the big screen in years.