Wall-E Consumerism

A Future of Consumerism

Many have speculated on what the future of this planet may look like in the next 1000 years. The human race has had a larger impact on the planet over the past 100 years than it had for the first 10,000 years of their existence. Each new era of human existence has been brought on by advancements in technology and the need of an individual to survive and advance, which within the past 100 years has entailed money and material. The film “Wall-E” successfully depicts a realistic illustration of how innovations in robotic technology, brought on by mass consumerism, can lead to a society geared towards convenience and laziness, as opposed to progress for the human race. While Idiocracy treats this theme, it fails to address

In terms of setting, earth has become uninhabitable due to the extensive accumulation of garbage brought on by mass consumerism. This increase in human consumption was further supported through advancements in robotic technology. Humans no longer had to perform trivial daily tasks or even leave the house for that matter, producing a society of convenience and laziness. Further reducing human activity were advancements in robotic technology which brings us to the main characters of the story. The protagonist being a little robot named Wall-E which stands for: Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class. This class of robots was produced to clean up the environmental damage that was left behind by humans, who were forced to leave earth aboard a luxury spaceship because it was no longer inhabitable. After 700 years, Wall-E has outlasted his fellow robots and is the only remaining functioning robot left on earth, and yet Wall-E continues his duty of cleaning up the garbage left behind by the massive consumerism of previous human races. Wall-E is finally visited by the robot Eve: Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator, who was created by the human race to determine when Earth would regain its habitability. While humans are continuing their convenient consumer driven lives aboard the luxury spaceship through the use of grooming bots, cleaning bots, beauty bots, and any type of bot meant to eliminate trivial human behavior, they send robots such as Eve down to earth to determine when they will be able to return to the planet. However, once it is clear that life can sustain itself again on Earth’s surface, Auto which is short for autopilot, who is the robotic captain of the ship decides that returning to Earth would alter this way of life that BnL has worked so hard to create. BnL is the corporation that officially