I re-watched WALL-E the other night and few questions occurred to me tha were not (so far as I can tell) answered in the wiki..
I don’t see any backstory so I realize some of these are purely speculative questions.
Are there more human carrying ships in space than the Axiom or is that it? Let’s say that ship carries (estimate) 50,000 to 100,000 people. Is that all of humanity that’s left? The intro seems to suggest “ships” leaving the Axiom being the best.
Did robot tech become better in space or did they ship out with the super advanced(compared to Wall-E) robots like Eve who has anti-gravity drive and quantum ion cannons? “Auto” the ships wheel autopilot seems unchanged over time in the photo series of the captains portraits.
Lastly is the Earth really ready to be colonized again? It still seems like a Max-Max Fury Road type hellscape even with the plucky plant.
If you look carefully at the tree that “plucky plant” grows up to be, you’ll note that it later goes on to provide shade for Flik’s ant colony.
And Carl and Ellie Frederickson picnic under it. AND Jessie the yodeling cowgirl gets left under it when the young lady who once loved her puts away childish things.
The Earth didn’t seem to have suffered a nuclear war or meteor strike or was even super-polluted. They’d just run out of room for crops or space to live on it because of all the garbage. And technology had advanced enough that it was easier to just abandon it in favor of the luxury yacht spaceships were everything was provided for you (hence everyone turning into lazy, literally couch-potato-shaped blobs).
And yes, the technology left behind like WALL-E stayed the same whereas the stuff on the ships continued to advance. And the opening scenes which show how slowly WALL-E compresses, cubes, and stacks the garbage and then shows how huge the stacks of them are implies that he’s been doing it for a very long time.
Yeah, those are just little Easter eggs Pixar sneaks in for sharp-eyed fans to find. Some have said it means that all the films take place in the same universe (though I don’t see how the Cars films could*!*)
I always wondered where the Axion got all the raw materials to sustain the population. They’re happily jettisoning large quantities of garbage into space on a regular basis - what are they replacing this with? Otherwise after 700 years they’d have long since run out of pretty much everything.
ETA:
In the little animations at the end you get to see the colonists using the modern technology to terraform (for the lack of a better word) the planet. The presence of the plant meant that Earth could now sustain life - they still had to do all the hard work of making it actually habitable (and of course they could still presumably live on the ship in the meantime).
Wasn’t it the case that Buy & Large ultimately decided that the earth was too far gone and humanity would not be coming back, so they shut down all the waste clearing machinery? WALL-E was just the one unit that was missed, so his technology level may not be representative of the operation as a whole.
Just because Earth had become capable of sprouting one little plant doesn’t mean the colossal piles of trash had gone away. Wall-E may have compacted a small percentage of it in 700 years, but it was still there. That was the reason people left in the first place, wasn’t it?
Thing is, if your spaceship can keep 100,000 people fat and happy in deep space, it could do the same thing if you parked it on Earth. Probably a lot easier. You could build 10 sealed stationary habitats on Earth for the cost of building one habitat that has the ability to travel through space.
In the last scene before the closing credits start, they pan out to show that it’s not just “one little plant” that has sprouted.
Also, the closing credits show what the ship passengers and crew had to do once they got back to Earth, and it was shown in various styles of artwork that mimicked how artwork evolved throughout history (the first one was cave drawings; I think the next one was Roman-style mosaics), which implies that, while Earth went back to the way it did, it did not happen quickly - especially as it would have taken a number of generations to develop humans that could handle Earth gravity.
As for the garbage, here’s a possible theory; the Wall-A robots helped clean it up. (There is a deleted scene where Wall-A robots - like Wall-Es, but much larger - clear out the garbage on board the ship.)
The Wall-A robots were shown in the released version of the film. There might have been a deleted scene showing more of them, but I never saw the deleted scenes.
And Our Hero didn’t necessarily build those huge garbage ziggurats himself. We know that he’s the only one of his model still operational now, but we don’t know how long that’s been the case.
I presumed the Wall-A models were for the Arks while the smaller Wall-E models were for Earth, not that they were progressive models.
And I have a theory of how the organics are replenished on the Ark we meet up with. It has to do with the other Arks, and Soylent farms overseen by Eve models directed by Otto. The autopilot is only tasked with preserving his passengers after all.
A theory that’s only enhanced by the fact that a solid fifteen minutes of the movie is Wall-E carrying around a dead woman that he just met, and pretending that she’s his girlfriend.
In some scenes there are conveyor belts that go to the top of the trash skyscrapers and tons of trashed old versions of him hanging around he gets parts from so it was obviously a group effort.
Since apparently what they had going on the Axion had been sustainable for 700 years with no hint that a crisis was looming, and everyone was happy, it’s not clear why we’re supposed to be so happy people got to Earth.
I hadn’t though about why Eve was so much more sophisticated than Wall-E, but it sure doesn’t look like anybody on the ship is engaged in research and development, so I doubt there had been tech upgrades.
As far as the tech upgrading, the robots have clearly taken over everything, including maintaining and upgrading themselves when necessary.
As far as the people returning to Earth, well, that’s kinda the whole moral of the story. The Capt finally recognizes that they’re all living a lie. That they’re no longer a growing, evolving, creative species. And the reason that the machines don’t want to let them return is because they’re machines. That’s what they were programmed to do and they have no soul or conscious otherwise. Sort of like benevolent, non-murdering Terminators.
This is one big reason I liked the film, that its message was more that, rather than just typical, cliched, drum-circle hippie environmentalism…
