{"id":271,"date":"2008-06-29T08:17:42","date_gmt":"2008-06-29T16:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=271"},"modified":"2008-06-29T08:17:42","modified_gmt":"2008-06-29T16:17:42","slug":"walle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/walle\/","title":{"rendered":"WALL*E"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

The movie was pretty good, despite having the most illogical premise ever.<\/p>\n

I’m not talking about the robot love story, where machines go against their programming to acquire free will and human emotion. I grew up with Hanna-Barbera. I’m cool with smart-ass robot maids and rambunctious robot pets, so I have no qualms about robot romance. What bothered me is the inexplicable strategy of the humans in this film.<\/p>\n

B’n’L, a rapacious corporation-cum-government, has taken consumerist pandering to such obscenely wasteful levels that the earth is no longer fit for habitation. (OK, Hollywood blames the Earth’s environmental destruction on a monolithic corporation; nothing surprising there.) Then, as they deploy robots to clean up the planet, this same company has chosen to build a mammoth, luxury space liner, called Axiom, to transport the people away, with robot servants catering to their every whim. Think Starship Enterprise meets Royal Caribbean. Then, as B’n’L would, super-size it. And Axiom provides this luxury indefinitely, for centuries at a time, even though it was only designed for a five-year cruise.<\/p>\n

Maybe I’m just a victim of my aerospace engineering training, here, but it seems obvious to me that a spaceship is a self-contained environment. It has to provide everything needed to sustain the basics of life, let alone its luxuries. It must have a permanently renewable source of energy. It has to be able to recycle everything–water, air, waste of every kind–otherwise this ark would eventually be depleted. (There is a moment where we see that the ship regularly ejects waste from a trash hold into space, but let’s ignore that.)<\/p>\n

So, if B’n’L could, and would, create this sustainable, self-contained haven as a space-borne habitat, why couldn’t it have built it as a earth-bound biosphere? I mean, it could be as sealed off on Earth as it would have to be in space, except that it wouldn’t need all that extra propulsion and navigation equipment. Ask Hilton; a land-based hotel is much less complicated and costly than a sea-borne one. At least some people would presumably prefer a hotel to a high-end prison, even if that hotel were on a spoiled Earth. (That was, in fact, a conclusion quickly reached by the humans in this film.)<\/p>\n

I can abide retro notions of robots that don’t (quite) take over the world, and Brave New World<\/a> monopolies that do. I can laugh at human stupidity in a dystopian future<\/a>, and at human kinkiness in a post-apocalyptic paradise<\/a>. But I can’t help but notice when people make totally uneconomic choices about technology right there in hand. That does not compute<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The movie was pretty good, despite having the most illogical premise ever. I’m not talking about the robot love story, where machines go against their programming to acquire free will and human emotion. I grew up with Hanna-Barbera. I’m cool with smart-ass robot maids and rambunctious robot pets, so I have no qualms about robot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}