WALL*E continues to get mixed buzz

A lot of videos for WALL*E -- and for Presto, the short film that plays before it -- have been popping up online in the last few days, but I've been avoiding them, since the movie opens six days from now and I want to watch it relatively fresh.

However, I cannot help but note that, while everyone seems to love the character WALL*E, early reaction to the film WALL*E has been a little more ... mixed.

Oh, sure, Harry Knowles has been his usual orgasmic self, declaring the film not only the best thing that Pixar has ever done but the best thing that Disney has ever done, etc., etc. But others have been a bit more, shall we say, reserved.

Dirty Harry, formerly of Libertas, gives the film 2.5 stars out of 4, and he takes exception to a dig the film takes at President Bush, as is his wont -- but he has issues with the story, too:

The first forty-minutes are magical. The introduction to Wall-E and slow reveals of his routine and world are mesmerizing and almost completely without dialogue. Eve’s arrival, their courtship, and those first moments in outer space are equally wondrous. It’s only when we get inside of the ship and meet the human beings that things become routine in that frantic kind of way that hopes to cover for a lack of any real story.

The human characters (and robot supporting characters) are terribly underdeveloped. Much of the latter part of the second-act is spent with the ship’s captain, voiced by Jeff Garlin, but he’s flat, only there to move the plot along. As the plot turns towards the fate of the human characters, Wall-E and Eve are left to chase the Maguffin with a cast of “whacky” robots. Eventually this results in third-act numbness and you just bide your time until it’s over.

Meanwhile, my CT Movies editor Mark Moring included a brief note about the film in his newsletter yesterday:

On another note, the other day I saw one of the films I was most looking forward to all year—Wall*E, the latest from the creative geniuses at Pixar. I'll say this much: Pixar hasn't skipped a beat, and it's a very good movie from writer/director Andrew Stanton—though not as good, I would say, as his last film, Finding Nemo.

Finally, another colleague of mine who was on the same junket as Dirty Harry reports that there was "no uniform opinion emerging from the press corps" and he doubts the film will get the kind of love from critics that Ratatouille got. He also writes:

I'm pretty sure, though, that I've never before heard journalists talk about being concerned about reader backlash for writing a less-than-glowing review. Has Pixar become sacred?

I guess we'll find out when the film opens next week, and then when we see what kind of legs it has in the weeks that follow.

For what it's worth, my colleague also finds it "offensive" that the film has been given such a massive merchandising campaign; the junket even had a "Merchandising Suite" where journalists had to listen to a marketing pitch before they could pick up their swag. This movie is, remember, set in the future and based on the idea that rampant consumerism has destroyed the planet.