Word: earth
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...those who care less about science-fiction doomsday scenarios than the gnawing sense of dissatisfaction Shyamalan often wrings from his characters, the problems of the central couple are not exactly earth-shaking. They're childless, he's a little exasperated that she's so withdrawn, and she shared an apparently innocent dessert with a colleague who keeps pestering her with cell-phone messages. Wahlberg does all his fretting with a furrowed brow (which has not two but three vertical lines, possibly a new fashion statement for anxiety), while Deschanel bites her lip and rolls her gigantic blue eyes. Neither actor...
...reborn pride. The country boasts the world's biggest dam (the Three Gorges), the largest corps of engineers (350,000 new graduates every year) and the most urban areas with a population above 1 million (more than 100). The People's Republic is the most wired nation on earth (215 million--plus netizens) and has enjoyed one of the longest sustained economic expansions in history (three decades of on average nearly 10% annual growth...
...dusty cityscape shows remnants of a civilization: an empty bank, a cratered warehouse mall, tattered billboards for colas and travel agencies, all bearing the logo of Buy-N-Large. TOO MUCH TRASH--EARTH COVERED reads an old headline, and we note that some of the skyscrapers are made of compacted trash cubes. The planet has become one huge junkyard, as if all humanity were a rock band that had made a shambles of a hotel room, then just strolled out. The only remaining sign of organic life on Earth is that unkillable little bugger, a cockroach...
Among this urban detritus, something else is moving. It looks like another trash cube--but with binocular eyes, forklift plates for arms and Caterpillar tracks to navigate the rough terrain. The thing is called a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class--WALL?E--and its job is to clean up the mess of consumerism run amok. It's also apparently the last of its kind still functioning...
...families just a few miles upstream from the regional capital of Liuku, has been leveled and its residents relocated to higher ground. The project was officially carried out under the national "New Socialist Countryside" program. Villagers were compensated for the loss of fields that will be flooded. Earth movers, laborers and survey teams from the Sinohydro company, a member of the consortium that wants to dam the river, crawl over the site...