Wall-E

I think the reason this blog post was so hard for me was finding a topic that really spoke to me. First off, I really don't like Wall-E. I appreciate it's animation and production, but I never really got all the hype over it. And yes, I am aware that this is an extremely unpopular opinion. It just seems that the overarching themes of post apocalyptic world and human's destruction of Earth were too in your face, and the humanizing aspects of Wall-E's personality and his relationship with EVE were too forced.

However, something that I did experience from watching this film again was the way it made me think about previous films we've covered, Blade Runner, Artificial Intelligence, and Moon specifically. These four films all deal with some kind of machines that live among humans, with varying degrees of humanity. I think a very important trope of these films was it made the audience look at themselves and how we viewed humanity. In Blade Runner, the non-human factor was the Replicants. They were physically human, but they were engineered to be better, stronger versions. The fact that they were almost grown and assembled took away from their humanity, along with their short life spans and lack of emotions. Artificial Intelligence showed their non-humans as very similar, except they were mechanical inside, instead of being biologically the same as real humans. Moon again varied from this theme slightly by having actual clones; human in all aspects except they are a copy of a "real" human. In Wall-E's case, the nonhuman factor is a robot that actually looks like a robot.

Regardless of what kinds of "robots" these four films portrayed, they all had differing degrees of humanity. I was not particularly attached to the Replicants or David, because I knew they were not actually humans, and because they were not capable of portraying emotions that I related to as "human". My opinion changed for Moon and Wall-E, and the lines between how to treat robots and humans began to blur. I genuinely felt bad for both of the Sam's, but it was not because of his personality, because I considered him almost-human, and definitely more human than Roy or David. In Wall-E's case, I did consider him more human, based solely on his personality and actions. Wall-E's love for Eve was genuine, and so was his general personality- my favorite moments of this film were the beginning forty minutes or so of just Wall-E palling around. I think that the character of Wall-E is the most human-like character, even though he is a robot. While I'm still not entirely sold on the idea that emotions and love can be the sole basis for humanity, I agree that his actions made him more human than the other three characters.