Wall-E might be one of our favourite Pixar films, if not our absolute favourite. Doesn't make us cry as much as Up, mind. Or that one bit of Toy Story 3 where you think it's gonna end with Woody and Buzz dying a fiery death. Anyway, we're getting off track! The plot of Wall-E, if you're unfamiliar, is that Earth has long since been abandoned by humans. Mainly because we got too fat and wasteful. Which means the surface of the planet is just covered with junk, and all the technology we left behind. One such bit of tech is the eponymous robot, who is designed to clean up the abandoned globe in anticipation of mankind's return...at some point. They're not really clear on that. It's obvious Wall-E has been doing his job pretty dutifully for a fair old while, and gotten a little bored of it. Which is why he's so excited to first come across some honest-to-goodness green plant life amongst all the trash, and then the appearance of the sleek, iPod-esque beauty EVE, whose mission is to transport said plant to the humans and show them it's okay to come back to Earth now. Obviously, Wall-E falls in love with her. Yes, robots can do that. It's a Pixar film and it's MAGICAL, okay? It's also pretty much the exact same plot as the live-action Tom Cruise film Oblivion, which came out a few years later. They're so similar, in fact, that someone took the audio from an Oblivion trailer, mashed it up with the visuals from a Wall-E trailer, and they sync perfectly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IugWw7KxoZY Oblivion sees Cruise cleaning Earth up after it was decimated by the same nuclear weapons which saw off an alien invasion. The rest of humanity are floating up in space, having a whale of a time, until a mysterious female in a capsule turns up and discovers indications that there might still be life on the planet, and rushes to give them information to the people upstairs. Theres even a Cruise presents the lady with a little plant, which is pretty uncanny. And obviously things end up not being what they seem, conspiracies and cover-ups, yadda yadda yadda. The important takeaway is that Tom Cruise managed to be less charming than an imaginary CGI robot despite playing the exact same role in what's essentially an unofficial, uncredited remake.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
