I loved Wall-E. I particularly loved its pessimistic background and I think it may be the closest thing we see to Idiocracy for Kids.
I got into a long argument the other day about the technology in Wall-E. It was my opinion that there was a fairly clear dichotomy between types of technology that we saw and as a crazy sci-fi guy this leads to my own weird speculation on the timeline of Wall-E. I realize that I'm certainly over-thinking this, but perhaps others might find my "theory" interesting.
Here's what I'm lead to believe: Smart people band together to build an extra-solar colonization effort. This mega-corporation, call it the Cadre [1], of the rich, the intelligent, and any poor people willing/able to work off-Earth in manufacturing jobs builds a few extra-solar colony ships (presumably with resources from the asteroid belts and other planets). Upon the launch of the colony ships the mega-corporation is left as a somewhat rich shell of its former self, as economic wealth doesn't exactly cross star systems. The construction plans and schematics for the extra-solar colonization ships would have earthly copyrights, and thus when a cheapskate box store (Buy 'N' Large) buys what's left of the mega-corporation they gain a lot of interesting patents and designs.
All that's left on Earth at this takeover looks like a mix of the useless, the lazy, the fat "middle managers", etc. In essence we have the reverse ploy pulled upon the useless Golgafrincham in H2G2 canon. But here, I think, things get interesting: the Buy 'N' Large management manages to dig through the old Cadre notes and manages to put 2 and 2 together and actually manages to do updated tracking of global warming and earthly resource consumption... They decide to use Cadre patents to build their own starship, the Axiom. As well as they were able to build Cadre machines and to use them to their needs I think it is obvious they weren't entirely smart enough to use them correctly. They didn't have the know-how to choose a new solar system for colonization so they set the ship's mission to the goofy "recolonization" plan, using only a fraction of the Cadre design's extra-solar colonization equipment. [2] They also aren't smart enough to realize that construction of such a complex thing as the starship would only further the exhaustion of earthly resources and the problem of global warming.
Wall-E (and Wall-R) seem more like the robots that a cheap box store might produce: simple, stupid, disposable. Certainly a pretty stupid "last stand" anyway, they simply compress and move the garbage. When your crazy construction effort has produced so much of junk by-products and garbage it would seem time to think of some better strategy than "just compress it and we'll be fine".
So that's my biggest theory on the subject of Wall-E. My only other controversial theory being the pessimistic one that the fantasy at the beginning of the credits of the recreation of civilization with both humans hand in hand with the robots was purely a fairy tale. I don't think the humans could survive the conditions. I think it is merely one of many bot-civilization fairy tales of the human being/monster/creature. Part of a collection meant to contextualize humans for those parent-bots that continue to use the threat of "don't dally too far into the garbage heaps as you may be caught by a human and disassembled".
| [1] | Solely because Cadre sounds cool. |
| [2] | With the size of the Eve "probe-ship", I expect that Cadre designs probably threw in basic terraforming machinery. |