Pseudo-Reviews: Get Smart and WALL•E
Before I get started here, I want to admit that I kind of suck at reviewing things, and my memory is short-circuited enough that I’m not terribly good at recalling every detail of a movie I’ve only seen once, but I wanted to pass along my thoughts for those who may be contemplating seeing either of these movies. I’ve tried very hard not to spoil the plot of either film, but if you don’t want to know anything about them before seeing them, you may want to skip this post.
That said, in my opinion these were both well worth seeing in the theater. I used to watch Get Smart with my parents when it was in syndication on Nick at Nite, and have recently re-watched several episodes of season 1 as part of my effort to expose Ash to all of the stuff she missed out on as a kid. The TV show was always great fun, and the movie is very much a spiritual successor to the show. The original creators (one of whom was Mel Brooks) were listed front and center on the end credits as being consultants for the movie, and evidently the original Agent 99 (as well as Mel Brooks) signed off on the casting of Anne Hathaway… I can only imagine that similar approval was given for Steve Carell as Max Smart. All in all, it’s obvious that great pains were taken to make sure that the movie fit in with the TV show, and the effort is obvious in the script and characters.
The movie is set in present day, in the sort of odd ret-conning that every old TV show-turned-movie seems to undergo to be relevant while retaining the original characters, but it’s never a jarring move. At the beginning of the movie, Max is an analyst, not an agent, and is extremely good at his job while also being something of a klutz. The Chief – masterfully played by Alan Arkin – only reluctantly promotes him after there is a breach of security exposing all existing agents’ identities. There’s occasional commentary on the current administration and the War on Terror, with Max intelligently stating that even though our enemies are bad guys, they’re still human beings, and if we’re ever going to defeat them, we first have to understand this fact. The President also seems to have Bush’s incomprehensible inability to pronounce the word “nuclear” correctly, which the Chief tries to correct at one point (evoking a cheer from the audience).
The theme from the show comes out in spades with a great twist during Carell’s trip down the famous multi-doored corridor to CONTROL headquarters, and has a number of remixes for the high-action sequences as the film reaches its climax. All of the old running gags from the show - “Would you believe…”, “Missed it by that much”, “Sorry about that Chief”, “Ah, the old [fill in the blank] trick” – and many of the old props – the shoephone, the Cone of Silence, and Max’s old car – are trotted out, but they’re never overdone, and fit into the flow of the show very well. Overall, the comedy is very intelligent, relying a lot on the interaction between Carell and Hathaway, which is just fantastic. That’s not to say there isn’t some more low-brow humor, but it’s spaced out pretty widely throughout the show. The new characters, like Agent 23 (played by The Rock) are also well-written and well acted (contrary to what The Scorpion King might indicate, The Rock actually can act pretty well, and he has pretty good comedic timing).
All in all, I suspect you’d probably need to be a fan of the original show to get the most bang for your buck out of this movie, but it’s worth seeing if only for Steve Carell, who is a dead ringer for Don Adams, the original Agent 86, Maxwell Smart.
Shifting gears (oy, no pun intended, I swear), I’d also like to voice my opinion on WALL•E (but first, I’d like to thank Apple for making it so easy to type the bullet character… Option+8 = •).
GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT NOW. GET UP! MOVE IT! I’ll wait for you to get back.
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Are you back? Good, let’s continue then.
Much could (and probably has been) said about the superficial resemblance of WALL•E to everybody’s favorite malfunctioning robot: Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. They both have the articulate eyes/eyebrows, they’ve both developed quirky, inquisitive, naïve personalities, and they both have a thing for girls. That’s pretty much where the similarities end, though; WALL•E doesn’t have much of a vocabulary beyond what he picks up from his crush, EVE, instead speaking in R2-D2-like exclamations (which is hardly surprising, since his sound designer was also the sound designer for R2). WALL•E’s job is also very different from Johnny 5’s original purpose. While Johnny 5 was a weapon of war, WALL•E is essentially a trash compactor on wheels, built as one of a fleet of such robots to clean up the mess left by humans while they abandoned Earth to live on a massive luxury-liner starship called the Axiom.
For those who don’t like movies with messages in them, be warned that WALL•E might put you off with its unsurprisingly pro-environment message. By the time WALL•E was originally built, the planet was almost entirely covered in the trash created by humans, and even space is cluttered with a halo of junked satellites. There’s a bit of humorous commentary on the super-conglomerations of today getting even more out of hand with the obscenely cleverly-named “Buy N Large” super store, whose CEO is somehow also president of the planet.
Oddly, this latest outing from Pixar actually has live-action sequences integrated into it: BNL’s CEO is played on-camera by Fred Willard, whom many may recognize as being Vala’s dad in Stargate SG-1. All of the commercial footage detailing humanity’s plan to evacuate Earth while the fleet of WALL•E ‘bots cleaned the place up features real people interacting with Pixar’s beautiful CG backgrounds, with the help of Pixar’s former parent company, Industrial Light & Magic. I suspect that this odd decision was made to create a really distinct visual delineation between humans of yesteryear and their bloated, pampered, low-bone-mass, hoverchair-lounging descendants we see in the movie, and while it’s a tad jarring initially, it does work for me. I think there was also a bit of influence on this decision due to the fact that WALL•E has an old tape of Hello Dolly that he watches through an ancient 5G iPod screen, and Pixar probably didn’t want to try re-doing Hello Dolly in CG.
Visually, WALL•E is an absolutely mind-blowing tour-de-force of the Pixar team’s inimitable talent. The first 5 minutes of the film blow away even the most visually stunning sequences in Ratatouille, and it only goes uphill from there. The sequences on the trash-covered, dust-caked Earth are probably some of the most intense because of all the particle effects, but the clinical futuristic look of the Axiom and its army of robotic helpers is just as impressive because it still looks real, not like some plastic-y product of crummy CG work. There are a lot of elements that seem pulled straight from Apple’s product line, the most notable being EVE herself, who was co-designed by Apple’s chief engineer, Jonathan Ive. WALL•E, despite being 700 years old and obviously less “cool” than the fleet of futuristic ‘bots inhabiting the Axiom, also possesses a certain Apple touch: when his solar battery is completely charged, he plays the classic Mac boot-up noise (something that surprised Ash so much that she didn’t stop laughing for a straight 3 minutes afterward).
Overall, the dialogue in this movie is pretty sparse. Since the main characters are EVE and WALL•E, and their conversations are usually restricted to them saying each other’s names, there isn’t much room for additional dialogue. However, there are a few other more talkative characters, including the Axiom’s captain and his robotic auto-pilot, Auto (the cleverness… when will it end?). Pixar’s lucky charm John Ratzenberger once again makes an appearance, playing a passenger on the Axiom (who is also named John).
Even the end credits get some fabulous treatment thanks to a wonderful new song from Peter Gabriel called “Down to Earth” (which sounds like it could be a missing track from Ovo), accompanied by intricate 2D animation sequences similar to the ones that Pixar used in Ratatouille, and followed up by some downright cute pixel-art versions of the characters in the movie silently re-enacting the plot over the remaining music.
Ultimately, despite the somewhat obvious commentary on our treatment of Earth, our increasing tendency towards laziness and virtual interaction, and our reliance on robots for increasingly basic activities (all of which I tend to agree with, so it dodn’t really bug me), WALL•E is a beautiful film with surprisingly emotive main characters (none of the robots even have mouths, and except for Auto – who sounds like an evil version of Stephen Hawking’s voice synthesizer – none of them really even have a vocabulary beyond a few basic words), tons of visual spectacle, and a gorgeous soundscape and soundtrack.
GO SEE IT!