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.
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?
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.
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.
Now with a 3 billion dollar hole to make up they may or may not continue that magnanimity.
It's just straight up hypocrisy.