WALL-E -- Did they spend more than 5 seconds on the plot? (spoilers)

[Finagle]

Thanks to some torrential downpours, I had a chance to see WALL-E last week. And…considering it’s about 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, I was less impressed than I thought I’d be.

Visually? Fabulous movie. Completely what I’d expect from Pixar. Plotwise? About what I’d expect from a 12 year old writing their first science fiction story.

OK, the whole maguffin is that EVE is looking for a plant. Any plant. Once they find a plant, they know Earth can support life and they can return. Ummm…if Earth has spent 700 years without photosynthesis occurring, is that plant supposed to appear spontaneously? Many of the other absurdities in the plot sort of sprout from there. How is it that none of the other probes found photosynthesizing plants? The pull-away shot at the end of the movie shows lots of them. How do you expect to support a city-sized spaceship full of (let’s face it) couch potatoes on a landscape that’s so barren that a single plant is cause for celebration and which is apparently swept by frequent dust storms of Damnation Alley severity? (If the ecosystem is that trashed, then the autopilot was probably right – going back was a terrible idea.) Why did the autopilot attempt to destroy the plant by throwing it in an escape pod with the self destruct on instead of throwing it down a garbage chute? Why does an escape pod * have * a self destruct?

Minor things that bugged me more than they should have.

Why do WALL-E and Eve have two word vocabularies? Either a robot can talk or it can’t. So EVE would not eventually boop out “Directive”. She’d either say nothing or say “My directive is look for photosynthetic lifeforms. This prohibits me from indulging in hot but unlikely robot relations with you.”

So the robots spent 700 years putting all the garbage into big piles? It would have been a somewhat more machine-affirming movie if all that work had actually made a difference.

Pretty impressive staying power on that garbage, btw. 700 years exposed to the elements and even the pop bottles should have been pretty decomposed. Instead, we’ve got bras and boots and working holographic projectors.

If you have a space probe with enough power to travel to what appears to be another galaxy, do you really have to do a slingshot trajectory across the sun and around Saturn? Very cool visually, but kind of wasted on your deactivated robot probe units.
Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed the movie. I just had to ignore the fact that * nothing in it made any sense whatsoever *.

[DrFidelius]

Oh, you thought it was a science fiction movie. It’s not. It is a fable.

[Litoris]

Wait – there was a plot? I just thought it was a cute movie geared towards little kids. I enjoyed it and oddly enough, don’t look for plots in Pixar or Disney movies.

[Skywatcher]

@Finagle

How is it that none of the other probes found photosynthesizing plants? The pull-away shot at the end of the movie shows lots of them.

That scene is set in the future and those were planted by humans.

[Finagle]

@Lute Skywatcher

That scene is set in the future and those were planted by humans.

Nope. A bit before that. As they pull away from WALL-E and EVE, you can see the same plant sprouting from the garbage.

[Skywatcher]

@Finagle

Nope. A bit before that. As they pull away from WALL-E and EVE, you can see the same plant sprouting from the garbage.

I believe you missed where people from the Axiom planted it.

[Simplicio]

@Finagle

How do you expect to support a city-sized spaceship full of (let’s face it) couch potatoes on a landscape that’s so barren that a single plant is cause for celebration and which is apparently swept by frequent dust storms of Damnation Alley severity? (If the ecosystem is that trashed, then the autopilot was probably right – going back was a terrible idea.)

Well, they still have a completely self-contained spaceship capable of supporting all of them on the surface. Presumably they would still live out of the ship while working on the surface to make it capable of sustaining life.

Agree the rest doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I don’t think its supposed to. Its unlikely a real environmental disaster would take the form of big piles of garbage everywhere for example, but for the purposes of a kids movie big piles of garbage are a good stand in for pollution, so big piles of garbage it is. Certainly WALL-E as a trash compactor robot needs much less explanation then if he was built to process atmospheric toxins or something.

Ditto for finding a single plant meaning the planet is inhabitable, it isn’t really realistic, but as a metaphor for the planet being inhabitable again, its instantly understandable without need for any explanatory dialogue.

[Miller]

@Finagle

OK, the whole maguffin is that EVE is looking for a plant. Any plant. Once they find a plant, they know Earth can support life and they can return. Ummm…if Earth has spent 700 years without photosynthesis occurring, is that plant supposed to appear spontaneously? Many of the other absurdities in the plot sort of sprout from there. How is it that none of the other probes found photosynthesizing plants?

Who says they didn’t? The ship’s autopilot is actively conspiring to keep knowledge that the Earth is reclaimable from the ship’s crew. This isn’t likely to be the first time one of the probes has found something, it was just the first time the autopilot wasn’t able to succesfully cover it up.

The pull-away shot at the end of the movie shows lots of them. How do you expect to support a city-sized spaceship full of (let’s face it) couch potatoes on a landscape that’s so barren that a single plant is cause for celebration and which is apparently swept by frequent dust storms of Damnation Alley severity?

I’m guessing they’re going to use that city-sized spaceship to support them, just like they did for the 700 years they were living in space.

Why did the autopilot attempt to destroy the plant by throwing it in an escape pod with the self destruct on instead of throwing it down a garbage chute? Why does an escape pod * have * a self destruct?

Good point on both counts. Although the unneccesary self-destruct mechanism is, at least, a common sci-fi anomaly, not something unique to this movie.

Why do WALL-E and Eve have two word vocabularies? Either a robot can talk or it can’t. So EVE would not eventually boop out “Directive”. She’d either say nothing or say “My directive is look for photosynthetic lifeforms. This prohibits me from indulging in hot but unlikely robot relations with you.”

Actually, they’ve both clearly got extensive vocabularies: they don’t have any trouble understanding anything the humans say to them, for example. They just have limited ability to vocalize. Which isn’t so unlikely. They weren’t designed to speak, but they’re smart enough to use what limited audio they’re capable of making in ways not intended by their designers.

So the robots spent 700 years putting all the garbage into big piles? It would have been a somewhat more machine-affirming movie if all that work had actually made a difference.

It did make a difference: it laid the groundwork for the eventual reclamation of the planet.

Pretty impressive staying power on that garbage, btw. 700 years exposed to the elements and even the pop bottles should have been pretty decomposed. Instead, we’ve got bras and boots and working holographic projectors.

Yeah, it’s pretty impressive that he found a working paddle-ball after 700 years, considering that I’ve never owned one that lasted more than five minutes after I took it out of the plastic wrap. But, it made for a funny scene, so that excuses it, as far as I’m concerned.

If you have a space probe with enough power to travel to what appears to be another galaxy, do you really have to do a slingshot trajectory across the sun and around Saturn? Very cool visually, but kind of wasted on your deactivated robot probe units.

They weren’t in another galaxy. The entire film takes place within our solar system.

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed the movie. I just had to ignore the fact that nothing in it made any sense whatsoever .

It made perfect narrative sense. It just wasn’t scientifically accurate.

BTW, you missed a big one: the giant trash compactors launching garbage into space. They’re in a closed ecosystem, and they’re hurling hundreds of tons of debris into space every five minutes? Where are they getting all the raw material to replace that? This one bugged me because it’s not just a science failing, but a narrative failing: 700 years in a spaceship, and human society still hasn’t solved the basic flaw that made them leave Earth in the first place. It would have worked better if the cubes were being sent to some sort of giant recycling machine that would break the material down to be reused. You’d still have Wall-E and Eve in peril, but you’d also establish a new technology that would be used to reclaim the surface of the Earth.

[FlyingCowOfDoom]

@Miller

They weren’t in another galaxy. The entire film takes place within our solar system.

How do you know this?

–FCOD

[Red_Barchetta]

@Litoris

Wait – there was a plot? I just thought it was a cute movie geared towards little kids. I enjoyed it and oddly enough, don’t look for plots in Pixar or Disney movies.

But the bext Disney and Pixar films do have good plots. Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Lion King…

[Miller]

@FlyingCowOfDoom

How do you know this?

–FCOD

Speaking strictly from the text, I “know” it in the sense that there’s nothing in the movie to suggest otherwise. They don’t ever say they’re still in the same solar system, but they don’t ever say they’re outside it, either, and there’s no plot reason for them to have left the solar system entirely, since they’re hanging around in space and not actively looking to colonize any other planets.

Drawing on extra-textual sources, I worked last year on a Wall-E video game tie-in, and saw a lot of the Disney production material, where it was made clear that the Axiom was waiting somewhere around the orbit of Pluto.

[Finagle]

@Miller

Drawing on extra-textual sources, I worked last year on a Wall-E video game tie-in, and saw a lot of the Disney production material, where it was made clear that the Axiom was waiting somewhere around the orbit of Pluto.

Well, I’m skeptical, because it sure appeared as though the Axiom was floating outside of the plane of a spiral galaxy when the probe approached. Not the view you’d get from the orbit of Pluto.

[Jules_Andre]

Here’s one I can’t remember being addressed: if the auto-pilot was in control of the spacecraft and all its systems, and it didn’t want the humans to ever return to Earth, why was it sending out probes to begin with? Can anyone remember if that was answered?

[Miller]

@Finagle

Well, I’m skeptical, because it sure appeared as though the Axiom was floating outside of the plane of a spiral galaxy when the probe approached. Not the view you’d get from the orbit of Pluto.

Here’s the scene of Wall-E first approaching the Axiom. It’s hiding in some sort of dust cloud, which I don’t believe is actually part of the geography of our solar system, but I don’t see any spiral galaxies in the background. The scenes leading up to that are all of Wall-E passing recognizable planets from our neighborhood. Perhaps you’re misremembering this scene of him passing Saturn’s rings?

@Jules Andre

Here’s one I can’t remember being addressed: if the auto-pilot was in control of the spacecraft and all its systems, and it didn’t want the humans to ever return to Earth, why was it sending out probes to begin with? Can anyone remember if that was answered?

My guess? It had two programming directives: send out probes to search for signs of life, and ignore any signs of life the probes find. Being a computer, it never really noticed the disconnect between these two directives.

[garygnu]

@Jules Andre

Here’s one I can’t remember being addressed: if the auto-pilot was in control of the spacecraft and all its systems, and it didn’t want the humans to ever return to Earth, why was it sending out probes to begin with? Can anyone remember if that was answered?

The auto pilot wasn’t in complete control of all the systems. In any case, not sending out probes would have eventually raised suspicion, and since it was “known” that no life was sustainable anyway, nothing was expected to be found.

[commasense]

Although I noted many of the scientific inaccuracies mentioned here, I just enjoyed the film on its own merits.

Speaking of scientific inaccuracies, no one’s mentioned the first and most obvious: how did this little plant sprout up inside a 700-year-old refrigerator that Wall-E had to open with a blow torch? Even if we grant that the bottom was open to the soil beneath, it seemed clear that no light could have reached the sprout.

Also, it struck me that expecting to build a human-supporting ecosystem on the basis of a single plant was a bit, shall we say, optimistic. But I didn’t care. The movie was fun.

@Miller

Here’s the scene of Wall-E first approaching the Axiom. It’s hiding in some sort of dust cloud, which I don’t believe is actually part of the geography of our solar system, but I don’t see any spiral galaxies in the background. The scenes leading up to that are all of Wall-E passing recognizable planets from our neighborhood. Perhaps you’re misremembering this scene of him passing Saturn’s rings?

There was definitely a scene of the scout ship passing a spiral galaxy. Also, those clouds are clearly based on the Hubble Telescope image known as “Pillars of Creation,” located in the Eagle Nebula (M16), 7,000 light years from Earth.

And don’t forget they had to do a hyper-jump to get back to Earth, which they presumably wouldn’t have needed (or even invented) just to tool around the solar system.

I’m looking forward to the DVD, because I’m sure there are tons of inside jokes in the film, particularly in the fast moving scenes on board the Axiom. For instance, am I wrong, or did one of the bots in the repair shop (that later escaped) strongly resemble a bot from Silent Running?

I forgot to look for other Pixar “stars” that usually show up in Pixar movies: Nemo, Woody from Toy Story, Sully or Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc., etc. Did anyone else spot them?

[Erasmus_Darwin]

@Miller

BTW, you missed a big one: the giant trash compactors launching garbage into space. They’re in a closed ecosystem, and they’re hurling hundreds of tons of debris into space every five minutes? Where are they getting all the raw material to replace that? This one bugged me because it’s not just a science failing, but a narrative failing: 700 years in a spaceship, and human society still hasn’t solved the basic flaw that made them leave Earth in the first place. It would have worked better if the cubes were being sent to some sort of giant recycling machine that would break the material down to be reused. You’d still have Wall-E and Eve in peril, but you’d also establish a new technology that would be used to reclaim the surface of the Earth.

I agree with you on the science failing, but from a narrative perspective, it makes perfect sense. The Axiom was still the product of the same failing society that was relying on WALL-E units to fix the environment. If they could design recyclotrons for Axiom, they’d presumably be using similar devices on Earth, and everything would be in a lot better shape in 700 years.

As for them not developing it during the 700 years, you again have to look to the mindset behind the Axiom: Lean back, relax, enjoy your “short” vacation, and someone will be around to let you know when the Earth has been fixed up for you. Furthermore, if they did establish recycling technology on the Axiom, then it would make sense for them to head back to Earth and deploy it regardless of the EVE/photosynthesis situation, making all that (and the resulting cover-up) moot.

Most importantly though, it was entertaining seeing giant WALL-A counterparts to WALL-E.

@garygnu

The auto pilot wasn’t in complete control of all the systems. In any case, not sending out probes would have eventually raised suspicion, and since it was “known” that no life was sustainable anyway, nothing was expected to be found.

Supporting this argument is the fact that reviewing the probe findings seems to have been one of the captain’s regular duties. I seem to recall that when he was going through the motions on the day that the plant was found, he acted as if looking at the probe results was routine and didn’t react until he saw they were positive results.

@commasense

Speaking of scientific inaccuracies, no one’s mentioned the first and most obvious: how did this little plant sprout up inside a 700-year-old refrigerator that Wall-E had to open with a blow torch? Even if we grant that the bottom was open to the soil beneath, it seemed clear that no light could have reached the sprout.

I can’t help but think that this sounds like the setup for a joke about the light not really going out when you shut the refrigerator door.

I forgot to look for other Pixar “stars” that usually show up in Pixar movies: Nemo, Woody from Toy Story, Sully or Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc., etc. Did anyone else spot them?

I didn’t think to look either, but I did notice the ubiquitous voice of John Ratzenberger.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Simplicio

…Ditto for finding a single plant meaning the planet is inhabitable, it isn’t really realistic, but as a metaphor for the planet being inhabitable again, its instantly understandable without need for any explanatory dialogue.

That’s how I saw it. I thought it was supposed to be like the olive leaf brought back to the ark by the dove, telling Noah that the flood waters are receding.

Fun movie, a timely environmental message, but not the most rigorously-accurate science fiction, I think we can all agree.

[MrDibble]

@Miller

They weren’t in another galaxy. The entire film takes place within our solar system.

I too recall the probe ship flying past some pretty non-Solar System scenery, including a spiral galaxy (or nebula if you want to be charitable). This is after the the “skimming Saturn’s ring” bit. Plus there was specific mention of a hyperdrive at the end.

@Miller

BTW, you missed a big one: the giant trash compactors launching garbage into space. They’re in a closed ecosystem, and they’re hurling hundreds of tons of debris into space every five minutes? Where are they getting all the raw material to replace that?

Who said it was a closed system? If they send out a probe ship, they could also send out harvesting ships to, oh, maybe Saturn’s rings or all those other scenic bits we passed? Plenty of feedstock for hydroponics/nanoreplicators out in space.

[Miller]

@commasense

There was definitely a scene of the scout ship passing a spiral galaxy. Also, those clouds are clearly based on the Hubble Telescope image known as “Pillars of Creation,” located in the Eagle Nebula (M16), 7,000 light years from Earth.

Yeah, but how many billions of miles long are the Pillars? Obviously, Pixar was using them as inspiration for the stellar scenery, but I don’t think you can use them as a definite landmark (spacemark?) in defining the location of the Axiom. The scale is all wrong. If the Axiom were actually in the Pillars, you wouldn’t be able to see the Pillars, because they’re actually titanic dust clouds so sparsely scattered that you can only see them because you’re looking through hundreds of lightyears worth of dust. If you’re inside the cloud, the particles are so distant from each other that you’d never be able to see them.

And don’t forget they had to do a hyper-jump to get back to Earth, which they presumably wouldn’t have needed (or even invented) just to tool around the solar system.

The solar system by itself is large enough that it could take years to cross it at sublight speeds. Even for intrasystem jaunts, some sort of “hyperdrive” would be a huge advantage.

Of course, what this all comes down to is that Pixar didn’t do their homework. They went for stuff that looked cool, as opposed to realistic. What they showed in the film doesn’t actually fit either scenario perfectly. You’re going to have to bend or ignore something to make it fit into a realistic universe. It’s just a question of which way you want to bend it.

@MrDibble

Who said it was a closed system? If they send out a probe ship, they could also send out harvesting ships to, oh, maybe Saturn’s rings or all those other scenic bits we passed? Plenty of feedstock for hydroponics/nanoreplicators out in space.

I thought of that, but if they’ve got nanoreplicators that can turn space dust and moon rocks into usable goods, they could just use those nanoreplicators on the huge chunks of trash.