Word: robotically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...long as directors find symbiotic inspiration in minds as fertile as Winston's. (At his death he was working on Cameron's Avatar.) His finest achievements in his last decade, as he tried battling cancer to a draw, were the robot Teddy in A.I.-another melancholy mandroid in the Scissorhands style-and, just this year, the suit that Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark fashions in Iron Man. Stark's basement laboratory might have been Winston's workshop; the dedication and ingenuity Stark lavished on his jet-propelled armor were worthy of Stan the Man himself...
...Wars--like print crawl to inform viewers that this is Earth 800 years from now. The mechanical critter who is the film's hero can speak only in electronic grunts and sighs, or in one-word bursts, like a chattier R2-D2. The movie's other main creature, a robot named EVE, also can speak only a few words. Yet it's Pixar's big, bold belief that the mass audience will be astute enough to follow the visual clues and game enough to play along. So confident is the studio in its ability to charm audiences, it has made...
...only fitting that the last robot on Earth, like the first man, should find his EVE (for Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator). She has been sent as a probe from the gigantic spaceship on which all humans were evacuated 700 years before, and where their descendants live in pampered placidity. EVE is as advanced--smooth, sleek, white, egg-shaped, with glowing blue eyes--as WALL?E is clunky. When he sits next to her on a bench at sunset (he must also have seen Woody Allen's Manhattan) and tries to hold her sort-of hand, EVE rejects...
...Moloch!” cries Ginsberg. “Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! monstrous bombs!” A sphinx of cement and aluminum...
Obviously there's more potential drama in a man-vs.-machine battle than in a movie about how to get along with your computer. Favreau and the Wachowskis know this. Their films show their heroes blending with robot suits and race cars in order to vanquish the bad guys. And in doing so, they've provided plenty of standard action-movie pleasures. Iron Man gives you a guy flying over L.A., disrupting military aviation and confronting a villain in even larger metal couture. Speed Racer boasts enough auto-erotic car-nage to make Grand Theft Auto IV seem, by comparison...