Throughout the years, pollution, global warming, and climate change has been a danger to us and our environment. With the rise in fossil fuel burning and oil being dug out of the ground, large amounts of gas, smoke, and carbon have flooded into our atmosphere. These pollutants have burnt a hole in our Ozone layer, causing excess heat to be poured into the atmosphere.  As the condition of the Earth slowly starts to degrade, people have been considering alternatives based around space travel and moving the human race to a new inhabitable planet.

No movie shows this better than WALL-E, the garbage compacting and sorting robot who was left on Earth, as well as several copies, to clean the entire planet and make it more inhabitable for humans. Humans discovered new ways of space travel to put themselves into orbit for years to come. WALL-E becomes the last of his kind that wasn’t destroyed or broken down, developing a personality as the years go by. While fulfilling his purpose, he finds the last living plant on Earth, giving life to Earth a second chance. As to most, the story seems to be about two robots falling in love, but if you dig deeper into the story itself, you can find several meanings and messages hidden in plain sight.

As for WALL-E, as he gets sent into space to the ship the humans inhabited for around seven-hundred years, giving us perspective about how all the humans live in the ship. For example: how they get around, how they socialize with one another, how they eat, exercise, and sleep. While WALL-E is trying to get to the main part of the ship, we see that humans are more or less obese blobs that can’t get up out of their chairs. Showing that in our current time, how we as humans are getting progressively lazier as the rise of people sitting/laying down instead of doing meaningful activities that can benefit us. As shown here.

 Instead of striking a conversation face-to-face with someone, they use holographic screens, which is portrayed with the current generation on how we are on our phones, staring at our screens 24/7. And on how they eat, you’d expect they would be eating something that is actual food. But as shown, they eat by drinking different artificially flavored beverages out of slushie-like cups. Hinting to the artificial foods that we consume on a daily basis, and seeing as we are eating all of these foods that aren’t real, or natural. We are practically killing ourselves with almost everything we eat.

As Grant student, Emily Hawkins said, “The Earth is just being destroyed by everything that we’re making, and it’s warming up. And then that’s just creating even more problems for both us as humans and all the other plants and animals on the Earth.” She describes that in the time we live in, the machines, and activities we are doing and making is causing the environment to slowly wither away. Animals can become extinct with the land we are destroying, where they build their habitats, only to see it crash down into more land for humans to live in.

On human influence, and effect on the Earth during the duration that WALL-E is stranded on the sandstorm wasteland, we can see the unmanaged damage that humans have done to the planet. Buildings are tilting and either destroyed, stacks of waste and debris stretch for miles, and lifeless shells of the past robots that used to clean were no longer in service, now mangled and lost. As well as the setting that WALL-E is on in the world. The place seems to suffer from drought, as shown that it takes place in desert-like terrain, with frequent sandstorms being accompanied. Showing that the environment was absolutely stripped by humans, changing the biome as a whole.

To move back to when they were in the middle of space, we see during the movie that there are several upon several robots on the massive ship with many jobs to do, so they can benefit humans. This is portrayed on how we are using more technology to benefit us in somewhat unhealthy ways, as we’ve made pointless technology to help us with even the simplest of tasks. Is this the future that awaits humanity, or will we be able to change the direction we are headed?