Rhetoric of Space

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Wall-E














Wall-E is a recent is recent children’s movie with many messages. It is a very entertaining movie to kids and adults but it also includes messages that adults are more likely to pick up on. The positive message in this movie is that in the future we will be living in space on enormous luxurious space ships with robots attending to all of our needs. The negative message is that humans are wasteful and are polluting the earth and if we do not stop the world will be covered in trash and we will not survive on Earth. Certainly to me the negative message outweighs the positive one. Living in space would be cool and all but the fact that our Earth would be uninhabitable does not sound very pleasing.

Wall-E starts out showing images of space along with a song saying, “out there, full of shine and full of sparkle.” It is a pleasant song that is happy in nature and causes the viewer to have a pleasant mood and a pathos appeal towards space. Then after showing marvelous Galaxies and endless stars, the camera turns towards an obviously polluted and nasty looking Earth. It then zooms into Earth, passing through layers of destroyed satellites and trash, only to enter the atmosphere to find a dusty haze. Finally what appears to be mountains come into view, however these “mountains” are actually giant piles of trash with hundreds of wind turbines surrounding them. Then nuclear plants come into view and finally what appears to be a skyline of a great city. The skyline is actually of skyscraper sized piles of trash within a large city. The piles of trash are all taller than and outnumber the actual buildings in the city.


The introduction of the movie displays the major argument in this film that humans are destroying the Earth through pollution. I think that the argument is targeted towards both children and adults. Even though adults would pick up on the argument right away, I believe kids would see a destroyed Earth and trash everywhere and connect the dots.


I think Wall-E does an excellent job at getting its message across to the viewers. The movie shoves its intended message in the face of the viewers in the opening scene so it’s kind of hard to ignore it for the remainder of the film. In turn I feel obligated to give this movie a five out of five because it is such a good movie for any age group. 
















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