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Comment by px43 | Hacker News Reader

Was anyone blown away by any parts of this analysis? It kind of just seems like someone watched the movie and summarized the key messages, which I would hope any given 8 year old, who the movie is targeted to, would be able to do on their own.

I can appreciate that some people like to watch movies just for the flashy lights and silly voices, and might have missed the fact that the movie was trying to make some important points about consumerism. I guess I'm having a hard time understanding who this write-up is targeted to, and I feel like I'm missing some key piece of information that would make everything make sense.

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Every YouTube channel has a highest comment where someone describes the obvious message in the video. And everyone piles in and agrees. Many memes have a banner that says: this is funny. We are living in an age where people need signposting of basic meaning.

This isn't a new thing. Shakespeare started Romeo and Juliet with a plot synopsis.

People don't need the signposts. The signs get put up because we reward doing so. Us lemmings give these low effort comments upvotes and virtue points so the monkey brain of the sign-poster is incentivized to do it more. Even on HN is this behavior rampant.

It’s like that old saying: imagine someone at the 50th percentile of intelligence. Now realize half the people in the (US/other country/world) are less intelligent than they are.

That's ironic of itself: it's signposting the meaning of a very obvious fact / statistical reference (50th percentile)

Hah yeah I suppose so

I don’t know how to “imagine someone at the 50th percentile of intelligence”. Is this some second-order joke about how 90% of people consider themselves above average intelligence, including (most likely) the person who is asked to imagine? (This percentage is completely made up.)

I don't think this is a bad thing. Even an "obvious" message will have a large percent of viewers who don't get it. And that doesn't necessarily mean they're idiots, as other comments imply: they might be ESL speakers, not from the same culture as the message, children, distracted, neurodivergent, or just... didn't get it. A top explainer comment is also very helpful for people who don't want to commit to watching / reading yet.

I'm all about being elitist but shaming "signposting of basic meaning" doesn't make sense to me. Signposts are great.

American movies have tried to spell things out for a long time. It's pretty clear if you watch American remakes.

Also, audiences are seemingly so emotionally crippled they can't feel emotion without being played music.

That kind of handholding has been around for a long time.

To me the downfall of humanity is wall-e was just there to make the movie about robots. I don’t think it had any deeper meaning. I guess at the end they return to earth but only because it’s the logical end of the robot story.

What.

You don't see the climate narrative? The consumerism narrative? It's a literal "off world colony" of degenerated human blobs all watched over by machines of loving grace, who've never seen a live plant let alone looked away from a screen before. It's the most obvious narrative ever. How did you miss it?

Ironically Disney is one of the most successful companies promoting consumerism.

I don't think there is any irony in it. No matter what the underlying themes might have been, Disney nakedly used it to sell crap to people who didn't need it while making those people feel good that they too care about the environment.

It's just straight up hypocrisy.

Andor was pretty confusing in that way. Pretty on-the-nose anti-corporate messaging from Disney, of all organisations. If I had to nominate a current company to "be" Pre-Mor, it would probably be a toss-up between Amazon and Disney, but Disney has the edge for basically owning a Corporate Sector in Florida¹.

One wonders if, after all these decades of "fight the evil system" media where it's always the plucky brave underdog individualists against the oppressive corporate/technocrat elite, but often underwritten and funded by those exact types, that they're actually deliberately flaring off those public feelings.

¹: Actually there's probably a gruesome mining multinational that's more similar but they keep their names carefully out of the public consciousness.

"...that they're actually deliberately flaring off those public feelings."

It doesn't seem necessary. The USSR didn't flare off public sentiment -the CCP doesn't. In the USSR, the leadership saw that the system was a dead-end and took it upon itself to winddown/transform even before the people were ready. There were "subcultures" but they were no threat to the system.

Disney was secure enough in their position that they let Andor through.

Now with a 3 billion dollar hole to make up they may or may not continue that magnanimity.

See this comment from further down this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34765426

seriously? you think Andrew Stanton sit for days writing a screenplay set with a background of consumerism and ecology with the intention of writing another version of romeo and juliette with two robots as protagonists ? generally when an author writes a simple love story, his purpose is to have a backbone for his own message he wants to convey with other contextual elements of the story

> In the DVD commentary, Stanton said that he has been asked if it was his intention to make a movie about consumerism. His answer was it was not; it was a way to answer the question of how would the Earth get to the state where one robot would be left to continue the cleanup by itself. Nevertheless, some critics have noted an incongruity between the perceived pro-environmental and anti-consumerist messaging of the film, and the environmental impacts in the production and merchandising of the film [1]

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Themes)

Felt like a high school book report. It's well written, but not really anything novel. I don't have context for where this was published though, maybe it's supposed to just be a brief summary of key themes.

I’m never blown away by Perils Of Cheeseburgers cautionary tales.

lol have you seen an 8 year olds writing

Starting sentences with "lol" and "bro", for example.

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