WALL-E in rep
Watched WALL-E at a cinema in Qingdao, which is the center of the Chinese film industry, similar to Hollywood in the US. Chose it as it was in English and family friendly. What with the spate of remakes, I wasn't sure if it was a new version of an old film. However, as they were also showing Shawshank Redemption, it didn't come as a surprise that it was in rep.
I was pleasantly surprised by WALL-E and found it alarmingly prescient (2008). A monopolistic company, 'Buy N Large', de facto controls the world and trashes it. Robots are left behind to clean up the mess while humans escape in a spaceship. The humans become infantilised and alienated from each other, as their lives are organized by a system of robots that control the ship. The humans degenerate both physically and mentally.
In the end, humanity is saved by a robot, WALL-E, who finds beauty in a single weed growing amongst trash on Earth, and love in a fellow robot. I enjoyed the themes of endstage capitalism, environmental destruction, technology leading to alienation and decay, and the unusual resolution that it was a robot that rekindles what it means to be human. I didn't understand the lack of cultural and ethnic diversity amongst the humans on the spaceship: were only English-speaking white people saved?