Wanted (2008) and Wall-E (2008) – A Study in Contrasts

Both films end by asking – one explicitly, one implicitly – “well, what have you done lately?” Many of the same pathologies and failures of modern life are laid bare and criticized, but the routes taken towards these ends are dramatically different. To the question as posed by Wanted one can respond only with delusion or despair (3/10); as posed by Wall-E, with hope and awe (9.5/10). If you’re interested in one film and not the other, simply scroll to that film’s poster image; that’s where its review begins.

A thousand years ago, Wanted informs its viewers in preamble, a group of unnamed men banded together with the vague charter of carrying out assassinations based on the imperfections they found in a piece of cloth. This is the high point of the film.

From there we leap to “six weeks ago,” as the useless, anxiety-pill-popping Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) endures day after day alternately in the box-like apartment and the box-like cubicle that dually constitute the bulk of his world. His shrill girlfriend, he cheerfully narrates, does not respect him, and is cheating on him with his repugnant best friend. Both of them sponge off of him in numerous ways. His boss does not respect him, his work is unfulfilling, and there is not a thing in the world that moves, excites or gratifies him.

All of this changes, however, when he is by turns seduced, rescued and kidnapped (mostly at the same time) by the Fox (Angelina Jolie), a mysterious woman with a penchant for tattoos and shooting everything. One car chase later they’ve arrived at a castle in the industrial sector of Chicago and Wesley is duly informed by the equally-mysterious Sloan (Morgan Freeman) that he (Wesley) isn’t a no-account loser after all, but rather the son of the one of the greatest assassins who ever lived and inheritor of his father’s powers. After several false starts Wesley is inducted into The Fraternity, the current incarnation of that mysterious group of men from ten centuries back, still unaccountably taking orders from a piece of cloth the imperfections of which are evidently determined by fate. Everything he ever wanted is given to him. He has a new sense of purpose, a new sense of style (and the clothes to match), the ability to kill people in a variety of dazzling and superhuman ways, a hot quasi-girlfriend in the Fox, millions of dollars in the bank, and no seeming obstacle on the horizon to prevent him from living out the rest of his days in an orgy of blood and cloth-ordained mayhem.

Of course it all falls apart, this being an action movie; there are betrayals and double-crosses and someone has a hidden agenda and so on. Most will be able to see it coming from miles away; just look for the character whose motives, methods and explanations are the most ridiculous and you’ve probably got it figured out. Along the way we’re treated to numerous montages and fancy car work, guns that can shoot around corners, shooters that can curve a bullet as a pitcher would curve a ball, well-administered beatings performed upon dimly-understanding victims, a bunch of rats exploding, the Fox naked but for a great deal of ink, snipers who can fire across cities and the unfeeling destruction of an entire train worth of innocent people towards an end none of those involved even understand. The film ends with a chaste and elegant general massacre.

Timur Bekmambetov knows how to direct action sequences. I grant that. He’s taken his own ideas, honed by his previous work on Russian supernatural thrillers like Night Watch and Day Watch, and combined it with the means and manner first popularized by films like Fight Club and The Matrix. If I can say anything positive about Wanted it’s that it’s finally a film in which extended slow-motion “bullet time” sequences are both entirely appropriate and quite artfully rendered. The trouble is that there’s so little to Wanted apart from the action that those who go in with an appetitite for anything but incident piled upon incident will be sorely disappointed. There have plenty of films like this in recent years – like Shoot ‘Em Up, Crank and Smokin’ Aces to name but a few – but standing in the shadow of magnificent work like Die Hard, Terminator II or John Woo’s Hard Boiled the vacuity of such films becomes all too readily apparent. There was a lot of name-dropping in that paragraph. Sorry.

It would also only be just to praise James McAvoy for his more or less effective work in the lead. McAvoy has lept into the mainstream lately with star-making turns in films as diverse as The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardobe and last year’s Atonement, and the tired fury he brings to Wesley gives Wanted much of the little charm it has, if you can get over the character’s constant whining. The rest of the cast carry themselves well enough, if a trifle stiffly. Freeman seems to enjoy himself, Jolie simply plays That Badass Character She Does, and the supporting cast are pretty much entirely forgettable apart from the pleasant contribution of Terence Stamp as a renegade (or is he?) bulletsmith.

And it should also be noted that the film departs dramatically from its source material, a series of comics by Mark Millar and artist J.G. Jones. Millar’s Wanted is really not that good either, though in some quite different ways, so I don’t recommend tracking it down in a bid to better understand the film. They have nothing much in common and are both frequently awful. It’s a shame, though, because Millar is often able to do some really excellent stuff (as with the instant classic Superman: Red Son, in which Kal-El’s crash landing on Earth is off by twelve hours and he becomes, as a result, a Soviet), but there’s really no way that this project could have ended well even if they had followed his example to the letter.

Wanted’s elaborate set pieces and admittedly inventive methods of madness are not enough to disguise the yawning abyss that lies at its heart. None of the assassins really know why they’re listening to the orders of a piece of cloth (it’s incredible that there are movies now that force me to write lines like this), and when they discover that one of their number has been gaming the system, as it were, there’s no argument they can really muster against it. The Fraternity has an elaborate sham for a code of honour that very few of the assassins seem ready to adhere to strictly in any event. By the time the the massacre occurs and most of them are dead, an optimistic viewer might be forgiven for hoping that Wanted was gearing up to be an indictment of the senseless, power-worshipping fever dream that Wesley thought had given him purpose. But no– it concludes with him solving his problems in the same old bullet-slinging way, declaring his satisifaction with the way things have turned out, and literally challenging the viewer to think of something more impressive he or she could boast. “What the f–k have you done lately?”

To trump such trumpery one would have to buy into a miserable fantasy world predicated on curving bullets and leaping between skyscrapers and limitless funding and ammunition. I worry that someone might even try to do that. The only alternative on the film’s own terms is to accept that Wesley is just a cooler guy than you are, sorry, and if you’re falling behind him it’s your own lazy fault. What’s more, as you don’t have his ill-explained super gene you couldn’t do the things he does with all of the training and effort in the world. Just go back to your useless cubicle existence, plebs, nothing more to see here. So take your pick: delusion or despair.

Not so with Wall-E, the latest from Disney’s Pixar studios and a veritable masterpiece in its own right. Where Wanted inspires a dubious sort of “self-improvement” through appeals to all that is cruel and rapacious in man, Wall-E instead stakes claim to bolder and more fragile things: wonder, kindness, duty, and unconditional love. Where Wanted could do nothing but fetishize the filth that sometimes tarnishes the human soul even by beginning a thousand years in the past, Wall-E drags it from the muck, cleans it off, and brings it roaring onto the screen through a diminutive robot toiling away almost a thousand years into the future.

If you’ve seen any of the film’s trailers, you’ve probably got a good idea what the film’s first act is about. Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class) is a small trash-compacting robot slowly tidying up an Earth long deserted by the humans who so polluted it. It’s very much of a piece with other “last man on Earth” films I’ve mentioned in previous reviews, except that he’s not a man, there are no threats to his survival and he’s not entirely unhappy with his circumstances. He’s been doing this for seven hundred years, most of that time spent entirely alone – the rest of his class of robots, occasionally seen in the background, have long since broken down completely and are now little more than sad, rusting reminders of his complete isolation. For whatever reason, alone of all his race Wall-E seems to have some spark of sentience, and this self-awareness and even personality have seen him thwart decay by repairing himself with components from other robots. By his own ingenuity and love of life he is seemingly doomed to eternal solitude and meaningless toil. The results of this toil are as enormous as they are insignificant: towering pillars of compacted trash cubes that dwarf the tallest skyscrapers, but exponentially more still to be compacted. And there are more severe problems – toxic waters, periodic sandstorms, a low brown sky – that are quite beyond his meager efforts.

And yet he persists. On one level he certainly does it because he was programmed to, but there is a great deal of personal interest in the work for him as well. While compacting trash he discovers numerous artifacts of a bygone culture – a spork, a lightbulb, a Rubik’s cube, among others – that he collects, plays with and sorts back at the old transport vehicle that serves as his “home.” His most cherished possession is an old videotape of Gene Kelly’s 1969 adaptation of Hello Dolly!, which Wall-E watches constantly and attempts to emulate. The songs “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes a Moment” from that musical are essential elements in Wall-E, about which more later.

The arrival of a new robot – EVE – sent to do a check-up on the otherwise desolate Earth changes the terms of Wall-E’s existence entirely. Where he is old, rough and ugly, she is new, sleek and beautiful, a robot designed by robots. When he first sees her, things from the movie he cherishes so much start to make even greater sense, and the crushing weight of his loneliness finally comes over him. From then on for Wall-E it’s EVE or nothing, and the result is one of the most strange and touching love stories ever presented to an audience.

What happens next is too wonderful to spoil extensively, but I can safely say that circumstances see both Wall-E and EVE returned to the Axiom, the enormous spaceship containing what remains of human civilization. What they discover doesn’t surprise them in the least – EVE because she knows nothing else, and Wall-E because he doesn’t seem to notice it very much – but it should certainly surprise is. This is no depressed, endlessly-waiting humanity made strong by adversity, but rather a race of near-infants, too fat to move without special hoverchairs, completely immersed in virtual environments while their every physical need is taken care of by robots. It should go without saying that Wall-E’s arrival shakes them out of their gilded complacency, but how and why I will leave to the reader to discover.

There is so much to praise in a film like Wall-E that it would be easier to simply say what didn’t quite work about it, but that’s not going to happen either because there wasn’t anything. The reason I’ve given it a 9.5 rather than a 10 is because of the necessary presence of constant, child-pleasing comedy. In no way is it poorly wrought or overdone, but it robs the work of some of its seriousness. And make no mistake, this is a serious endeavour; Andrew Stanton (writer and director) has taken the tools the consistantly brilliant minds at Pixar have given to him and crafted a 100-minute children’s film in which philosophy, romance, tragedy and joy perform quite a delicate dance. I’ve seen the film twice now, and after the first time I was only prepared to give it a 9 out of 10, thinking it might possibly have benefitted from being more gritty and less cartoonish in some way, but it occured to me that the scenes set on Earth at least could not possibly be any less cartoonish without actually being real (the computer graphics are astonishing), and in a grittier film two robots would hardly have been falling in love in the first place. Taking it for what it is, though, it simply cannot be matched – except, possibly, by Brad Bird’s 1999 masterpiece The Iron Giant (I’ll rewatch that and get back to you).

I haven’t talked about voice acting because there isn’t much. The first half of the film includes almost nothing in the way of human dialogue, the bulk of it coming from Hello Dolly!. Wall-E and EVE instead communicate through incredibly well-constructed body language, with what few sounds they make being produced by Ben Burtt and Elissa Knight, respectively. Their delight at learning that they can with some effort say each other’s names is just heartbreaking (but in that good way that so few things can really evoke), and Wall-E’s little robot sigh at hearing his name first spoken by EVE is one of the finest small touches among hundreds in the film. The human characters of the second half don’t have too much to say either, though Jeff Garlin does good work as the disillusioned captain of the Axiom, Sigourney Weaver provides a standard-sounding female voice for the ship’s computer, and John Ratzenberger and Kathy Najimy have small parts as two humans who are accidently disconnected from the virtual entertainment stream.

There’s much more that I want to say, but this is already running fairly long and I doubt I could do justice to so marvelous a film. See it. See it today! It’s the right thing to do. Be sure to stay for the credits: they provide a sort of epilogue to the film that the five critics in the world who gave it bad reviews apparently didn’t bother to see.

And before I forget, there’s this:

The song (“It Only Takes a Moment”) and the scene in which it is sung first suggest to Wall-E that there may be something missing from his existence for which finding interesting things in a scrapheap is no substitute. The part we see in the film (and the part he watches) begins at just after 4:45, though the whole scene is so completely important to Wall-E that I almost hope they include it as an extra on the eventual DVD. Don’t worry about not knowing who the characters are or what’s going on. Just let it wash over you (and reflect upon the fact that Michael Crawford, the guy doing the bulk of the singing, will eventually go on to become the best-ever iteration of the Phantom of the Opera, at least as far as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical is concerned). What was just another song in a possibly underrated musical has become the haunting and unforgettable “robot love theme” in what is so far the best film of the year, and certainly one of the very best animated features in the history of the medium. It may even be an important moment in the history of film, full stop. I don’t know. We’ll see.

If you’re looking to choose between the two films reviewed here there’s really no difficulty. Wanted is packed from start to finish with depravity and stylized violence, terrible philosophy, plentiful cursing, gruesome murders, some laughable non-explicit sex, extensive rear nudity (albeit with tattoos) and about as much narrative power as the phone book. Wall-E, on the other hand, has not a single objectionable moment in it and will provide for young and old alike a memorable journey into a greater and more glorious world. The only caveat I have to offer is that it might make those who are single feel desperately lonely, but this is more than counterbalanced by how much it also makes one feel as though one can do something about it. But that is in no way a bad thing; if you have a heart, it will be touched. If you have thoughts, they will be provoked. While Wanted continues to wallow in ignominy and defeat, Wall-E is nothing less than one of the rare and jewel-like victories of our art.