I have not been a fan of animation movies simply because I am not really into science fiction, fairy tales, or mythical legends; it was my editor who advised me to watch “WALL-E”, assuring me I would be inspired, betting me I would change my mind.
At the beginning of the 2008 computer-animated romantic science fiction movie, I had the feeling I would not like it at all because most of the first half of the movie is sort of a silent movie. After a while, however, I found myself engrossed in an unusual love story embedded with so many significant messages, bringing tears to my eyes.
A cautionary tale that takes place several hundred years in the future, “WALL‑E” reflects how, if misused, technology can ruin our life instead of improving it. The movie features a robot, WALL-E—Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth—created by “Buy-N-Large Corporation”, which has transferred all human beings from Earth to a spaceship called Axiom, leaving WALL-E alone to clean the waste and garbage humans left behind.
On the spaceship Axiom, a large army of robots serve the people who have turned into extremely fat, lazy, and useless creatures. All they do is sit on their hover-chairs, drinking their food through a straw as automation has cancelled their need to walk or even reach across a table for food.
Back on Earth, the lonely robot WALL-E spends his time collecting trash, compressing it into cubes and building towers using them. He collects things he finds interesting from the trash and keeps them in his home. One day, EVE—Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator—a much more advanced robot arrives on Earth to detect any sign of life on Earth, which would signal the possibility for the Axiom passengers to return back.
Finding company at long last, WALL-E “falls in love” with EVE, who finds a seedling in WALL-E’s home, at which point she completely pauses until she is brought back to Axiom. Lovesick and stricken, WALL-E follows her to the spaceship.
Although WALL-E's only aim on Axiom is to find his beloved EVE, in his quest to find her, he meets various robots, each with their own specific job, all related to cleaning up. It is apparent that human consumption is what has trashed Earth, and is now polluting outer space as well.
Despite being tiny and relegated to the dirtiest of the dirty jobs, WALL-E begins to show Axiom habitants how to regain what they have lost through sloth and over reliance on technology.
The movie reflects the downside of technology. From calculators to computers; and now laptops, tablets, and Smartphones, technology can be a motivator for laziness and isolation. People spend hours with high-tech equipment rather than with other people; they use machines rather than their bodies and brains to move from one place to another, to find information, and even to think.
Even children stay home and spend a lot of time playing video games rather than having a normal childhood, spending time playing in parks, coloring, or playing board games that stimulate their mental abilities and skills.
Nowadays, you can speak to your car and ask it to park by itself. There are smart televisions that interact with you and turn off when you fall asleep. All these technologies seem fabulous, but if you think for a while you will find that they make people dependent on them, becoming lazy even to do the smallest things like turning off the television.
There is no doubt that technology takes us to a new phase of life; however, relying too much on technology may cause drastic consequences to our life and our planet. Technology offers comfort to human beings, but that comfort is not always something good as they might someday become Axiom habitants!
References
independent.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
movies.nytimes.com
cinemablend.com