Shared Darkness

It’s only June, but with Wall▪E, the latest collaboration from
Pixar/Disney, the pole position in the race for the next Best Animated
Feature Oscar has clearly been staked out. A bold, wondrous and
touching work that thrills and entertains even as it strives to impart
a message of moderation and environmental respect, Wall▪E is two parts
robot love story and one part cautionary conservation tale, with just
enough anarchic intergalactic adventure thrown in to sweeten the pot
for wide-eyed adolescents.

Set in an apocalyptic, consumerist wasteland seven or eight centuries into the future, the movie centers around squat, solar-powered WALL•E (short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class), who’s apparently the last robot on the planet. Wall▪E wanders around the dust storm-ravaged landscape, where seemingly only Twinkies and his pet cockroach have survived, dutifully compacting trash into neat cubes, and stacking them into towering structures that summon to mind the leaning garbage towers in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.

Wall▪E possesses a unique combination of loyal obligation and instinctual yearning. He keeps performing his “directive,” even in the face of its absurd futility, but also watches clips from Hello, Dolly! over and over, and collects various knick-knacks and trinkets which catch his eyes, stashing them in scrupulously ordered bins, as much for a sense of domestic comfort as any future practical use.

Wall▪E discovers a new purpose in life, though, when a sleek search robot named EVE (an acronym for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Examiner), lands on Earth to search for signs of photosynthesis. Trepidatious at first, Wall▪E befriends EVE, who comes to realize that, in the form of a small seedling, WALL•E has inadvertently stumbled upon the key to the Earth’s future. When this revelation kick-starts an automatic departure, WALL•E gives chase after his new love.

Pixar’s meticulous attention to detail, both visually and conceptually, makes Wall▪E an absolute joy to watch — in fact, to experience may be the operative word. Wall▪E’s personality — his curiosity, compassion and desire for connection — comes through with crystal clarity. His Earthbound rituals — struggling to get his treads on in the pre-dawn morning, like a commuter before their coffee — feed a strong and sympathetic identification with him.

Like Brad Bird’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille, too, the film pushes the envelope for kid-pitched big screen fare, underscoring the fact that animation is a medium and not a genre in and of itself. Andrew Stanton, a co-director of A Bug’s Life and the driving force behind 2003’s Oscar-winning Finding Nemo, delivers a movie with considerable heart, narrative substance and characters to care about. A few moments early on may be tough for younger viewers to translate, given that a viewing of Wall▪E requires one to engage more actively than a lot of animated films, which trade chiefly in noise and color. It is, in many ways, particularly its first third, a very adult film about keeping the wolves of loneliness and despair at bay.

Its concessions toward kids, though — a gallery of malfunctioning, rogue robots that become Wall▪E and Eve’s protectors during a frenetic chase sequence, say — actually always feed the story, though, instead of merely some checklist of scatological humor. As it is thoughtful, Wall▪E is about caring for others and the environment around all of us, and the regenerative value that comes from both. For the full review, from Reelz, click here. (Pixar/Walt Disney, G, 103 minutes)

A fun, fairly crisp opening hour gives way to a muddled, entirely unsatisfying ending in the action-comedy Hancock, which finds Will Smith starring as a sullen superhero trying to win over the population of Los Angeles via a very public makeover. Delivering very much more in personable half measures than in thrilling fashion on its actual premise, Smith’s first summer entry in four years — coming on the heels of his biggest Stateside hit in more than a decade in the form of last December’s I Am Legend — should own the box office for a week-plus after its July 2 opening, but face stiff sci-fi action competition when Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy II bows the following week.



When we first meet Hancock, who’s awakened to stop some fleeing bad guys shooting up a highway, he’s swigging bourbon from a bottle and blowing his nose on his hand — hardly the behavior audiences have come to expect from Smith. Disgruntled, sarcastic and misunderstood, Hancock gets the job done, but his heroics often leave a trail of enormous municipal damage in their wake. After being saved by Hancock, public relations executive Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) pitches his rescuer on an image rehabilitation. He advises Hancock to turn himself in on an outstanding bench warrant for his arrest, hypothesizing that a needy public will appreciate his act of penance and also come to recognize and more fully appreciate his indispensability. Begrudgingly, Hancock acquiesces. While Ray’s young son idolizes Hancock, even in his imprisoned state, Ray’s wife Mary (Charlize Theron) seems to regard him much more cautiously.

When Hancock finally is summoned from jail, he foils a bank robbery that looks like it was staged by guys who might have watched Heat one time too many (perhaps too overt of a tip of the cap by director Peter Berg, given that producer Michael Mann also cameos in the film). Hancock also inadvertently starts learning a bit more about his past, of which he has heretofore had no recollection.

Hancock gets by for the bulk of its running time on the relative strength of its character, which allows Smith both to display his roguish charm and play against type, as squinty, pained and reticent. Hancock‘s truly fatal miscalculation, however, comes in its final third, when the script tries to get into its protagonist’s past, but ends up peddling all sorts of incongruous information. Outright baffling choices mark the last 30-35 minutes of the movie, even if its special effects work mostly sings and zings. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/Columbia, PG-13, 92 minutes)