Mrs. Carden and I saw Wall-E with my in-laws on Friday night. My take: very cute, visually spectacular, economically illiterate. Mike Hammock, who really liked it, offers a detailed discussion here. Writing for the Mises Institute, Gennady Stolyarov II is much less kind. The trailer for The Clone Wars was worth the price of admission.

A few questions and major, major spoilers are below the fold. Do not proceed unless you have already seen the movie or at least want to know how it ends.

Let's run for just a second with Gennady Stolyarov's thesis that Wall-E is a critique of modernity. At the end of the movie, they show the captain demonstrating the wonders of farming (I warned you!!!). Laying aside for a second the fact that most of the people would be unable to walk if they have spent their entire lives in hovering chairs, I wonder whether there wouldn't be a massive return to the Axiom after it was discovered that farming is really, really hard. My thought during the closing credits was "90% of the population dies within a year," but they still have at their disposal a gigantic spaceship that apparently has the technology to provide them with whatever they want, whenever they want it. As the people are faced with a game of choose-your-own-dystopia, I wonder which one emerges: the anti-modern agrarian dystopia in which everybody dies, or the hyper-modern corporate dystopia in which people revert to their over-stimulated blobbery? Assuming that some go anti-modern and others go hyper-modern, will there be conflict between the two civilizations? Will these questions be answered in a sequel? The mind boggles.