True; I should have said that he’s the only one working those ziggurats.
The captain realizes that Earth is good, and that it was worth returning to and taking care of it. Where does he say anything about humans growing, evolving, being creative? I’ve seen the film a few times, but it’s possible I missed this. The only message I remember about the human race is that they’re all fatties now, eeeeeeew! The problem of sustainability caused by massive consumption has been done away with somehow. Miraculously, the only limited resource is room to dump your trash. And the critique of consumption, consumerism and instant gratification culture, which in the real world are going to produce a crisis in resources available to gather long before it runs out of garbage space, has been reduced to one point, namely “eeeeeew, fatties!” They’re post-scarcity, post-inequality, infinite access to food, shelter and entertainment, but the movie’s point is that it’s not worth it because fatties. Fatties!
As for the computers, it was just one computer that didn’t want them to return, and that was because it was stubbornly obeying the last orders from a human corporate master who had been dead for centuries. It just happened to have command over a lot of mindless enforcement drones.
I think you are confusing cause and effect. Fatness is not evil in and of itself. The fat people on the ship prove to be quite helpful and effective despite being human balloons and are seemingly eager to return home and progress beyond the ship. The evil is the mindless overconsumption and waste allowed by industrial and scientific advances in service to delivering maximum amounts of everything. Maximal production and maximal consumption going round and round. Fatness and waste are symptoms of this (evil) cycle not the evil itself.
It seems far fetched but if we developed a technology for supplying endless cheap energy I think we would start to see the edges of some of those problems.
But of course if people are able to survive fat and happy in space for 700 years and can dump their garbage in space rather than into Earth’s delicate ecosystem, then the problem of scarcity has been solved. And why dump your garbage into space when you can just dump it in the mass converter, or whatever magical power source they have. And where does the garbage come from? Do they have masses of robots providing material inputs to the ship, which are then spewed out as waste?
Anyway, the point is, if you can build a ship like that, you don’t need to trash the Earth to sustain your hedonistic lifestyle. You can have both–wallowing in freakish luxury, and a pristine park-like Earth. No need for the trade-off implied by the movie.
The fatness is meant to produce horror or derision at the condition of humans. They are also shown to be shallow, of course, though if we try to build a whole picture of the inhabitants lacking the dignity of mindfulness and the enrichment of seeking pleasures of the soul, we are thwarted when it turns out that these same people quickly rise to the challenge and struggle to do right without hesitation. It seems that their souls have not been corrupted by generations of sloth, somehow. They’re just fat, that’s all. Morally and spiritually, they’re doing just fine.
You bring up an interesting point re the plausibility of the movie. The overall super technology demonstrated in the Axiom is such that there really is no need to be using the Earth as a garbage dump. You can build a warping space ship and robots with antigravity, tractor beams and ion cannons and … you can’t get rid of your trash?
This was amusing -
WALL-E] What happened to the other BNL Starliners? (self.AskScienceFiction)
The decision to leave Earth wasn’t a rational one. It was made by a profit driven corporation, one that had already been making decisions for nations and individuals alike for a very long time.
Earth wasn’t just filled with trash, it was toxic. There could have been sanctuary domes or something instead of spaceships, but that, in the mind of Buy N Large, would not have cordoned off humans enough. The reminder of what used to be would be right outside the door. No, better to completely remove everyone and keep them complacent and dependent on BnL in the ships. Same reason why just being in orbit was no good, either.
Any, “they could have done this instead” ideas can be explained by either deliberate corporate actions, or a genuine belief it wasn’t possible.
As for why Eve was still looking for life on Earth? Otto didn’t control everything, and they had to keep up the charade to the passengers. That, and they truly didn’t think they’d ever find anything.
I think that was more of just Otto being a computer. He had two instructions: periodically check to see if Earth can sustain life, and suppress any information that indicates that Earth can sustain life. Most humans in that situation would have just stopped doing step one, but as a computer, Otto didn’t see any reason not to follow both imperatives.