For the Independence Day, the family decided to take it easy and go out for a Matinee movie instead. We went to see “Wall-E.” We figured it’s probably fun for my 6-year-old daughter. Sure, another no-brainer robot movie from Disney to stir up a child’s imagination. Why not?

I was pleasantly surprised by how futuristic and foretelling the movie is. The move is about a ever curious, lonely, garbage-collector robot fell in a love with a more advanced earth probing robot,named Eva, from Axiom, its mother ship that houses many of the human refugees in space after leaving the earth that had turned inhabitable due to pollution. Not knowing the plot, I discovered along the way where Eva came from, what its mission is, what Axiom is, and why humans became the way they were (fat, lazy, and lack critical thinking). The twists are: the controlling robots were the “bad” guys but were under the “policy” dictated by the Axiom founder and the people turned to fat and boring vegetables that follow the routines they were given.

Wall-E is a cute, passionate, curious, industrious robot that every viewer can relate to. He was smart to stock up on spare parts for himself and during his lonely time watched some of the old ’60’s movies to kill time. Of course, he transformed himself into a small box when he put himself in the sleep mode. How ingenious he is. Isn’t that how human evolves from where we were before? The irony is that the humans inside Axiom are just the opposite. How foretelling it is if we human manage to design all the robots that take up all the dirty jobs of serving us, what will we become or evolve into?

The love story between Wall-E and Eva was a bit of stretch but I suppose it’s hard to bring up the “human-ness” in Wall-E without this. The way how Eva was touched by the caring and pursuit of Wall-E and reciprocated to rescue Wall-E also serves as a good human-like story.

A couple of interesting observations: The Eva robot looks like a Nintendo Wii character with the joints missing. In other words, the fingers, arms, head are sort of floating without connections, not bound by law of physics. Is that the future robot we come to expect? Also, the TV’s people are watching are their vehicle chairs are being projected like a hologram – I think this is quite doable.

The movie ended when the people of Axiom decided to come back home and leave the vegetated state was also a nice twist. The captain showed his leadership of battling the controlling robot and bringing back the “Noah’s Ark.” Of course, come into the earth and come out in the atmosphere at that state (without vegetation) without any sort of air supply could have killed them at once. But wearing masks out of the space ship could kill the dramatic moment.

Overall, I like the movie a lot. It’s entertaining and satirical at the same time. How many movies can do that?