"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote in message
news:49475bb5$1@news.povray.org...

> >  Anyways, if you haven't seen it, I suggest you go to rent it. Like now.
> > Don't even bother reading any further, just get up and go rent it.

> I bought it a couple of weeks back and watched it for the first time at
the
> weekend.  I must admit that I found several earlier Pixar films more
> enjoyable to watch.  I don't know whether I will feel like watching Wall-E
>
[...]
>
> From a purely CG viewpoint, excellent though.  There was one nit-pick I
had
> during the film but I forgot it afterwards so it can't have been that bad
> :-)

(Spoiler alert)





I agree that it's not one of the better movies from Pixar. It was in fact
rather disappointing, given all the rave. A 4 out of 10, 5 tops on a
charitable day.

The story is flat. Very flat, for a feature length film. Sometimes, it feels
like Pixar should stick to shorts.

Yes, CGI is top notch for portrayal of Wall-E and earth, and a short space
sequence. It fails for everything else (more later).

I won't go into logical flaws in detail. I am sure anyone who's remotely
interested in sci-fi will find dozens of major flaws. Yes, I know it's an
animation and a kid's movie. But it still cheapens the whole thing, and
creates an ambiguous atmosphere, when it's apparent that the writers cannot
be bothered with a straight story. It fails spectacularly on the consistency
front. The suspension of disbelief only works when the movie is consistent.
I can take realism. I can take fantasy. I can even take absolute nonsense.
But when you try to mix them all, it fails.

Speaking of cheapening, the humans were the poorest depiction in a CGI in
recent years. It feels like they ran over the budget with CGI for Wall-e and
decided to have a high school kid model and animate the humans and a B-movie
actor play the live one. The latter being the more inexplicable decision.
Actually the rationalization is transparent (so don't explain to me), but
it's just an admission of failure. Something like "we couldn't do it in CGI,
we couldn't do it with humans, so here, take this cheap mish-mash of a
solution and call it artistic license".

The movie plagiar- I mean, references, especially 2001 was also very cheap.
Yes, it's all been done before, but real artists at least try to construct
their own version. What appears cute on a Simpson cartoon does not go with
well on a feature length movie, that is supposed to be a "film".

Anyway, just because it's Pixar, and just because the animator mastered
putting droopy eyes on a robot does not make this a good movie. At the end
of the day, it was very average as a movie. Every CG artist should see it,
however, because of the hype and to learn from its successes and failures.

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