Wall-E vs Rambo

Wall-E is a trash-compacting robot, designed for durability, function and practicality, rather than elegance or character. Holy shit you guys, he’s adorable. Wait, that’s not his design! Those sneaky folks at Pixar do that to me all the time. Wall-E has no mouth (and doesn’t speak, aside from his own name and one other), but he’s got two little grabber hands, two huge eyes, and two tank-style sets of wheels for feet. That’s all he needs, really, to win us over, since it makes him look like a cross between one of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 robots and E.T. And you guys know how I feel about E.T.

Wall-E wheels around, sweeping up, picking up, compacting and stacking trash outside one of those huge, bulk grocery stores. Oh, and it’s a post-apocalyptic Earth, and no one lives there at all anymore, aside from a little unnamed cockroach that serves as Wall-E’s only friend. There other Wall-E cleaners out there, but they’ve all broken down (it’s too bad there’s not a little Wall-E fixer droid to make repairs). The humans are long gone. They trashed Earth and got off the planet (we find out how, and why, later in the movie, but I’ll leave that for you to discover on your own). Wall-E just keeps doing his job, good-naturedly, collecting little trinkets here and there for his collection.

And then Wall-E gets company. EVA is a much later, more sophisticated model of robot. She can fly, has eyes that light up, and is as sleek and white as an iPod. She’s also mostly silent, although she can also say two names. Wanna guess which two? She’s looking for something very specific on Earth, and finds it, and of course also sparks up a friendship with Wall-E, and it’s sweet, and they find they have a larger purpose.

Wall-E will be fun for older kids still willing to see Pixar movies. I suspect there’s a window of time, say fifth to ninth grade, when kids think they’re too cool to see cartoons. So, those fourth graders, and then those of us above tenth, are having a pretty good time. Those younger kids, who loved Cars and Finding Nemo, might be amused by the sight of robots running around, but plotwise, a lot of them are being left behind. Wall-E is a complicated story, and while it’s cute and fun, it’s upsetting too, if you give it a thought.

We learn, back on EVA’s ship (where Wall-E ingratiates himself with the robot staff there, teaching things like how to wave), what happened to the last humans to live on Earth, and how later generations have adapted to their new environment. It’s funny for a second, but as more and more questions are answered, you’ll might begin to realize that Wall-E is as much science-fiction-as-cautionary-tale as Planet of the Apes, Fahrenheit 451 or Gattaca. Wall-E is adorable, but his world is tragic.

You know it doesn’t stay that way though, right? Come on, look into that little guy’s eyes. E.T. and Wall-E both have tiny plants to take care of, and I don’t think it’s spoiling either movie to tell you they both do just fine.

Yeah, you’re totally gonna cry. I won’t tell anyone.

So, working out in the middle of nowhere, all by himself, only saying two words, but teaching others lessons about survival and humanity, despite not being human himself? You guys, Wall-E and Rambo are the same movie.

Oh, except if Rambo shoots you, even with an arrow, you explode and your arms and legs fly off in four different directions. During Rambo, I held my hand up to block the screen several times, and once, while laughing out loud, proclaimed “Is this a snuff film?” Rambo, written and directed by its star, Sylvester Stallone, is the single most bloody and shockingly brutal movie of the year. It clocks in at just over an hour, and offers way more gruesome deaths than it does minutes of movie. Think about that for just a second.

A group of missionaries wants to go into Burma . They claim they’ve done it before, but they also have no idea how to get there, or how to protect themselves, so either they’re dishonest, or didn’t take clear enough notes last time. They find “John”, who is rude, cold, crazy ripped, and has a boat. Half way up the river, they’re approached by pirates, who threaten the female member of the missionary crew. John kills them all, and then burns the boat and the bodies. On to Burma!

Where he kills everybody else. You’ve probably guessed that the missionaries get taken hostage, but you might not have guessed that John returns to the village with a squad of mercenaries, and that he usurps their leader and ambushes the bad guys to save the day. That’s right. Rambo is really…Rambos. It’s like Aliens, only instead of Ripley teaming up with the soldiers to fight aliens, it’s to fight, um, you know, uh, foreign people.

Hey, nobody said Rambo wouldn’t make you uncomfortable. Hell, it won’t make you anything else. Although, I admit, Rambo is fun, once you make that agreement between movie and brain exactly what you’re watching. Stallone obviously thinks he’s making a sociopolitical statement like Wall-E (Rambo opens with graphic news footage of massacres in Burma . It’s tackier than it is informative). He’s not. He’s just blowing shit up. Rambo makes an attempt, at the very end, to tug at your heartstrings a bit. If you’re still able to look at the screen by the end, let me know if it worked.

Wall-E: A-

Rambo: C-