Headscratchers / WALL•E

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How did other robots get personalities?

• WALL-E is shown to be different than the other WALL-Es because he's literally been left to run in isolation without any direct supervision for thousands of years. As a result, he developed a nascent love for collecting forgotten relics, obsessions with old musicals and a quirky go-lucky personality. The comparison to his development of a personality as the human equivalent of going insane on a castaway island is not lost. So then, how/ why do the other robots in WALL-E have established personalities? Eve, WALL-A, all of the reject robots clearly exhibit strong "likes" and "dislikes" and internal motivations. They aren't just blindly doing their repeated jobs, they're shown to have strong internal goals and driving factors, even if accomplishing said goal runs contrary to how they were told to solve it (see M-O). None of the robots are shown directly communicating with humans, so it can't be a user-friendliness design. But they're also not in total isolation like WALL-E was, so where and why did it develop from? And why is it that only Auto, the freaking master control program of the entire ship, wasn't given one?
• It's likely due to all of them being active for the same amount of time as WALL-E. They've been doing their jobs for seven hundred years over and over, so they began to develop their own glitches that are corrected (I.E. the reject bots), giving them all a reason to hide their personalities, or at least be more reserved about them compared to our lovable trash compactor. Plus, while not all of them interact directly with humans, they do still have a lot of opportunities to observe them during their work, so they probably picked up some mannerisms simply from seeing the humans go about their day. And as for AUTO, he does seem to have some personality, considering his increasing frustration during the films end, but is too dedicated to Directive A113 to even consider diverging from it.

Eve sneezing

• When WALL-E bring EVE back to his trailer to wait out the sandstorm, the sand and wind whipping around EVE as the door closes, makes her sneeze. Um, what?
  • Hey, you ever get dirt in your laptop, the results won't be pretty. The sand must have caused some malfunction that resulted in a sound and jolting motion that resembled a sneeze.
  • A sneeze, (a jolting motion combined with rapid expulsion of air) is an extremely efficient way to remove foreign contaminants. It's not a malfunction; its a feature.

No lockdown?

• When the Axiom PA warns of 'Rogue Robots,' why aren't the people sent to their rooms for their safety? They just get an alert? Don't arm yourselves or anything?
  • The first generation, the one that actually boarded, probably had a full safety drill. Things have gotten very lax, and it's more or less the Stewards' job now to prevent any harm from coming to the passengers.

Gather 'round the Holo-Detector!

• When the Captain activates the Holo-Detector, why are all the citizens transfered to the Lido deck? What sense does that make? So they can all see it? Why do they all need to be in the same place when the Holodetector is activated?
  • I assumed that putting the plant in the Holo-Detector was going to be some big ceremony where the Captain gets up on stage, declares that they're going home, and triumphantly puts the plant in. Also, Buy N Large seems like the company that would make something involuntarily mandatory.
  • It was shown in an advertisement near the beginning at the movie that the hoverchairs may have been initially intended for the elderly to use, for ease of movement, and that BnL never took into account that all of humanity would have become dependent upon them. Thus, the hoverchairs may have been programmed to bring their (presumed to be elderly, frail, and likely visually impaired and/or hard of hearing) occupants to the Lido deck to ensure they wouldn't be in a more dangerous part of the ship when it 'hyperjumped' back to Earth.

Humans in hyperdrive

• When the Axiom goes into Hyperdrive, the Captain is shown shaking at the wheel because the ship is flying so fast. Assuming a spaceship that needs a hyperdrive would be really far away, and thus, would have to go really fast to get back to Earth, wouldn't everyone on the Axiom die/fly off/get broken necks from the whiplash?
  • Would experiencing "slight bone loss" have something to do with it?
  • Inertia's obviously being nullified somehow or the whole ship would arrive looking like a crumpled beer can. Perhaps BnL built in a very slightly inadequate nullifier just so people wouldn't worry, "Why don't we feel like we're moving??"

That's one tough plant.

• How does the plant that WALL•E find survive for so long? It is manhandled, taken into space for weeks/months on the trip out to the Axiom, exposed to the vacuum of space for at least five minutes, wrestled over, and the worst that ever happens is a leaf falls off?
  • I'd imagine that EVE was specifically built to store a plant, so I have no problem with that part. Her compartment has lighting, water, air circulation, etc. The hard vacuum exposure is a little harder to reconcile, however.
    • Scientists in real life are growing plants in a vacuum and in lunar style conditions, if that helps any.
    • It's only actually in vacuum for a few seconds, and it's obviously a really tough plant from the fact that it grew in the first place.
    • Plus, Space Is Noisy in this film, which implies there was still some sort of atmosphere surrounding it.

Other ships in the fleet

• In the ad for Axiom, several ships were shown blasting off, and a "fleet" was referred to. Yet we only ever see one ship. What happened to all the others?
  • They're still out there in space somewhere, if the rest of the autopilots are anything like the Axiom's AUTO.
  • Unless the "pods" seen moving about in the end credits are presumed to have come from other ships. There appeared to be only the one dock, so the others might have needed to actually use their landing pod/shuttle things.
  • We never know what city we see for most of the movie - there's likely ships and docks all over the planet. Furthermore, it's likely that all of the other ships would be programmed to return home as soon as one ship activated the conditions necessary for it. We just don't see them.
  • Axiom is the flagship of the fleet. Presumably if it returns it can call the others back.
  • Perhaps it needs to find Earth again because everything in space is constantly moving very, very fast. The Sun goes around the galaxy at over 918,000 kilometers an hour, dragging the planets along with it. They've been floating out in the middle of nowhere for 700 years, so between the time they left and the time they return, the sun would have moved about 563,291,128,000 kilometers (that's five hundred sixty-three billion, two hundred ninety-one million, one hundred twenty eight thousand kilometers), Give or take a few, of course.
    • In the Castilian Spanish dub, the CEO refers to the automatic pilots-any word on other languages?
    • I believe it's the same in English — AUTO was just one of an entire class of auto-pilots, and they were all given directive A113. I personally prefer to imagine that all the other evacuation ships are still floating out in space, ripe for a sequel, or developing into a bunch of Planet of Hats-like isolated communities, or waiting for one of them to make it back and result in a Culture Clash with the descendants of the Axiom.
  • They were scattered all over the universe. A bunch of them landed on Planet Gunsmoke and began Trigun. Also a particularly big one was the setting for Last Exile. A few more fell into a wormhole and fell into a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away and so explains why humans are in Star Wars.
    Of course, my mistake.

Seeds

• Where did they get the seeds from the end credits? It looked like plants were much rarer than what they seemed to have rather quickly.
  • At the end of the film the camera pans out from the city for the first time to show that outside the city a bunch of plants are growing.
    • I got the impression that that was a farm, set up by the recolonizing humans. Plus, even if it was already there, it doesn't explain how they got enough to grow food crops like corn (which we saw), and not just weeds. Corn, as I recall, is incapable of reproducing without human aid, and as such using seeds from god-knows-where is the only possibility.
    • Given that the stated purpose of the starship fleet was to recolonize Earth eventually, they probably had stored supplies for that purpose. With very good preservation techniques, yeah.
    • Actually, I got the impression that all those plants had simply grown in the time WALL•E was away from earth. The Axiom returns to earth at lightspeed, yes, but he probably spent weeks, if not months hanging onto that Axiom-bound rocket, especially considering it passed the sun..
    • ^^^^(reply to above) I doubt this aspect of time dilation would have been considered as the movie's take on space travel is clearly designed for expedience and beauty. I got this impression from when the probe ship WALL•E hitched a ride on passed all the beautiful sights of the solar system in what we are lead to believe was a very short, scenic period of time. This itself is probably related to the joke that sci-fi authors have no spatial sense of actual space (for example it would be near impossible to hit an asteroid in the asteroid belt, but its commonly depicted as a death trap in fiction), so this leads me to believe they would ignore any realistic temporal-spatial problems like that.
    • Given that that was not a warp drive-driven rocket, it may have taken years if we assume that the Axiom is a good distance outside of the solar system.
    • You are forgetting that the cockroach is still alive and even waiting for WALL•E, cockroaches do not live that long, it could not be years, months maybe, although most likely were days as WALL•E's den doesn't seem to be particulary dusty and for the aforementioned cockroach to even be in the same spot. The best explanation for all the weed is that EVE just didn't find it but was already there, and I personally doubt that the Axiom was too far away from the solar system, even with FTL.
  • From the Doomsday Vault.
    • It's entirely feasible that the Space Cruisers were equipped to get Earth back to first base in terms of a stable ecosphere. So, you're probably looking at DNA logs and plant producers, cloning machines, and what-have-you. AKA the Doomsday Vault.
    • They used a Garden of Eden Creation Kit.
  • The problem with earth was toxicity making plants unable to grow. It still sounds far fetched, but it that was the problem, then I guess the ships were initially equipped with seeds in a doomsdays-vault-esque sort of way until earth is restored.

Movement

• How are the humans able to move so well? With no real muscle mass to speak of and bones horribly shrunk, and generations in microgravity, why weren't they utterly paralyzed by full Earth gravity?
  • That looked like full Earth gravity on the ship to me. Those chairs they were in hovered, as did some of the bots, but other than that, standard gravity seemed to be in effect.
  • I think it's implied that "the effects of microgravity" was just a convenient excuse they hid behind to avoid having to own up to the fact that they'd never done anything. Remember, it's only Shelby Forthright who mentions microgravity, and he's not the most reliable source.

No elders?

• Where are the old people? We see adults on the Axiom. We see babies. But the elderly? Where are they? Is cosmetic technology so good in the future that everyone stays looking like a young adult their entire lives? Or are these people so fat that they are dead by middle age from heart attacks?
  • There are old people on the Axiom. Look for the ones with gray hair and perhaps bald spots. They're shown in a few shots, and I'm guessing you'll find some blurred in the background. I'll also presume that you were being snarky and cynical with the 'heart attack' comment, since the plaques of the previous captains of the Axiom show that humankind managed to extend their lifespan to at least 120 years.
  • Look just behind the captain when humanity is exiting the Axiom for the first time. There is a little old lady with grey hair and a walker.

Growing more plants

• Shouldn't most of the soil still be too toxic to grow plants in? WALL•E's plant only grew because it was in a sealed environment.
  • For that matter, how DID WALL•E's plant grow? It couldn't possibly photosynthesize in a closed, lightless refrigerator.
    • More then likely the plant was a plant that require fresh soil and not much sun light, that and the fact it was only a small plant it must not have had been there for too long. That and to answer the original question, if the plant grows then the soil isn't toxic anymore, the fridge's bottom was probably rusted out.
  • The refrigerator door may have initially been open, allowing enough sunlight in to let the plant grow. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that one of the massive sandstorms could open or close the refrigerator door.
    • According to the story-board artist in the commentary, "No, no, the refrigerator was open, and then there was a strong wind that day, and it closed." He was quite passionate about this, too, as if he's had to defend this a lot.
  • The door wasn't actually on a fridge when WALL•E found the plant- the fridge is resting to the right of the door, and the plant is behind the door. So, apparently the fridge door came off much earlier, and the plant grew behind the door.
    • That, and some plants are incredibly hardy little buggers. Not necessarily, however, the same ones that are edible to humans (and even the ones that are will become a nice collection of toxins that are harmless to plant-based life, not so once unleashed in an animal's metabolism). One random type of plant springing up wild does not a garden make...
    • When I was in fourth grade, our teacher planted a seed in a pot in a closet as part of our science lesson. It actually grew a lot bigger than the one in the movie before it finally gave up the ghost.^note  Apropos of nothing: It also grew a lot faster than the control plant in the windowsill, and was a lot paler green. Presumably, it was trying to find some light before investing much energy in chlorophyll production.

Reproduction

• How did they reproduce when they lived on hoverchairs too small for two, and they weigh too much to be on top of one another?
  • Artificial conception and incubation.
  • Although that raises the question of how they reproduced after leaving the Axiom, with no one to teach them the facts of life.
  • The Captain basically had the internet on the ship's computer with a voice interface.
    • People have been having sex for far longer than there's been Sex Ed. It's just something we do.
    • Once they're off the Axiom and rebuilding Earth, they're also going to start losing weight quite rapidly. The key reason they're very obese on the ship is because they don't have to engage in any physical activity whatsoever. On Earth, they're going to have to move around on their own a lot more, so they're going to be burning off a lot of fat and calories.

Wall-As

• Why weren't any WALL-As used in Earth's cleanup? Their bigger size and greater capacity for garbage probably could have helped speed up the job of cleaning Earth.
  • Presumably, the WALL-As weren't invented until after the Axiom had long left Earth.
  • Watch the movie carefully. The WALL-As do not have tank treads like WALL•Es. They actually move on tracks built into the floor of the Axiom like trains. They would simply not be able to move on Earth until tracks had been built for them, which eventually happens by the credits.

Axiom economy

• Seriously, what is with the Axiom's economy? Buy n Large is obviously charging for food, clothes, etc; and, thus, making money...but they control everything on the ship, so there's nothing to spend the money on. And how are the passengers making money if nobody does anything, ever?
  • If you want actual reasoning, no matter how thin, then the voyage was probably all-expenses paid to begin with. After all, survival of the human race versus a five-year voyage on a space-faring shopping mall? Buy n Large probably wasn't that terminally retarded. And if that doesn't work, when Directive A113 was activated, it's not a stretch to think that everything then became free. Terminal space voyage on a space-faring shopping mall with no jobs'll do that.
    • Isn't that disproven when the Captain mentions the "free septucentennial cupcake-in-a-cup"? If everything had been free for years, why bother specifying that that in particular was free?
    • It was most likely a scripted speech, and since the Axiom is sponsored by BnL, it was probably just a buzzword that caught on and they never bothered getting rid of.
  • We also don't know that the residents don't do anything. I know I would be bored out of my mind in a place like that without anything to do. There probably are jobs to be done on the ship that we don't see, and just because robots can take care of everything doesn't mean that they do.
    • But... the whole point was that they were all insanely bored and useless precisely because they never did do anything, and because robots did do everything for them! If there were jobs doing after all, and if robots didn't do everything, the passengers wouldn't be as helpless and sedentary as the movie went out of its way to portray them as being. Also, they are passengers on a cruise ship. They are supposed to be just relaxing for their five-turned-seven-hundred year cruise, while the robots cater to their every whim... That was, again, the whole point! I'm going to go with "post-scarcity economy" here, because it was so heavily implied by the movie: The robots do absolutely everything, and the humans just relax and get bored all day long; either they get "allowances," or everything is free (with specific uses of the word being just tradition, or an obsolete buzz-word).
  • In the background of one Axiom shot, a huge billboard flashes "BUY NOW - PAY LATER." It could be that people were meant to pay (at interest) after they went home, but since they weren't going home, the actual payment never came up.
  • How about. BnL owns the ship and sells them stuff. But the passengers all own shares in BnL and the income BnL raises from sales on the ships are paid back to the passengers as dividends.
  • I just figured everybody on board has had their expenses charged to a 'credit card' all their lives. Remember: five-year mission. It wasn't expected for anybody to have to charge the lifetime expenses of the last 35 generations on that account, but with 100% of the population in default on their loan, enforcement wasn't exactly a priority.

Why does he have a tape recorder?

• Why would WALL•E need a tape recorder built into him? He's a trash compactor; why would he need to record sound?
  • Well, the little guy is obviously built to have some sort of speech and sound recognition wired into his AI, probably to give him a friendly personality to any human he should come across. Maybe the sound recorder was put on so that he could transmit messages. Or maybe he wired it into himself (he's shown himself to be quite competent at fixing himself, as well as very aware of his inner workings) so he could have a little bit of Michael Crawford everywhere he goes.
  • For the same reason you need a fridge with internet access.
• Regarding the above: I have no real problem with WALL•E having some sort of audio playback/recording device, but why a tape recorder? Remember, the WALL•E droids were apparently rather state-of-the-art when manufactured. Tapes are considered obsolete in the present, and WALL•E was supposedly manufactured centuries one century from now.
  • Simple, he probably added it on himself after a couple hundred years, so he could listen to some tunes on the job- we don't get a close enough look at the other WALL•Es to see if they also have buttons like that. If he added it himself, he'd be restricted to what he had on hand at the time, and he probably had just found a mostly intact tape recorder at juuust the right moment.
  • Actually, I've seen the film twice now, and it's never really revealed to be a tape recorder specifically, just a generic audio recorder/playback system. All we ever see of it are the control buttons, and—let's face it—the "pause" "stop" and "play" buttons have had the same universal symbols for decades now.
  • In fact, it's probably a hardware digital recorder. Reviewing the facts: 1) he can set it to record at any time, at any point, just by pushing record. Tape players require you to push record and play. 2) When he gets almost terminally crushed, there's no magnetic tape anywhere in his body. 3) After he's repaired and a number of components are replaced, Eve pushes the play button...and there's only static. If there was a tape, we would have seen it get pulled out.
  • The "tapes" obviously aren't normal magnetic tapes. EVE pulled out the track at one point, and she's electromagnetic enough to light bulbs by touching them, and it worked just fine. It's probably just retro for the sake of it.
    • Also, he never has to rewind the thing.
    • She's only electromagnetic by choice. The lightbulb only lights when she thinks about it a moment. EVE's telekinetic...?
    • The video cassette of Hello, Dolly! was very definitely supposed to be a (magnetic) VHS cassette. That also didn't get demagnetized when EVE touched it, implying that her light-bulb-lighting field isn't always on.

Auto pressing buttons

• Why does AUTO manually press buttons on the bridge rather than controlling the ship's internal circuitry itself? In fact, why do all the other robots have to push buttons?
  • It makes the humans feel better. I'll bet he's just pushing the buttons for show, and actually controls things through the circuitry anyway.
  • Unless it's a safety feature. He obviously has some accommodation for if he were to go rogue (the manual/automatic switch, notably), so maybe this is a safety feature? As the eventual ending shows, it's much easier to fight a robotic AI if it has the same problem controlling the ship (i.e. needs to actually hit input buttons) that you do.
    • However, he wasn't touching anything when he made the ship tilt at an angle. So it's probably a case of 'making the humans feel better' as mentioned above.
    • He's a steering wheel, meaning all he has to do is twist himself. Notice that it's the first thing the captain does once the ship's on manual
  • Button-push interfaces were designed so that a robot operator could be easily replaced by a human one if there was an emergency.
  • I assumed that when the ship was launched, initially the humans still performed some of the duties on board ship. Over time that amount decreased and the robots took over those duties. Rather than change the interfaces that were used by the humans, the robots were instead designed to interact with them in the way that the humans had. More than a few cases of where something is maintained long past the time its initial rationale has been abandoned. The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to prevent the metal bars in a typewriter from hitting each other and jamming. Yet it is still in use.

There's always a self-destruct feature...

• Why are the Axiom's escape pods armed with a self-destruct mechanism?
  • Who said that AUTO or the security bot couldn't have rigged something up, and, due to some sort of user-friendly subroutine, labeled it "SELF DESTRUCT"? Or maybe the ship designers were just sci-fi geeks and included it for fun, like in their favorite classic movies.
  • So, after some thinking, I think I have a reasonable explanation. I suspect that the self destruct mechanism was armed by GO-4 (I am assuming here that most other people initially assumed that WALL•E accidentally armed it, based on the admittedly flimsy logic that he did) in order to carry out directive A113... by destroying the plant. Going based off of this, it's not unreasonable to assume that the self destruct mechanism was locked behind some kind of security system that only a security bot like GO-4 could access. The function is mostly likely intended to destroy materials of a highly... sensitive nature. Perhaps Shelby Forthright had some 'personal demons' he wanted to 'exorcise,' as it were, and included it as a standard feature so as not to raise suspicion (this, of course, assumes that somewhere there's a person who would/could piece something like that together... or, at least, there was when Earth was abandoned). This is 90% speculation, of course.
  • A theory of mine states that it was installed for possible weapon use. It is a space ship after all, and you would think there would be some way to defend itself. However, in the film we don't see any weaponry of any kind on the ship (the fact that it is a passanger ship certainly attributes to that). That being said, rather than add on cannon systems, they just installed self-destruct mechanisms. So, if you shoot one of the pods out, and it lands inside a nearby ship. And self-destructs, well...
  • The escape pods were capable of space travel. That makes them space ships. And as everyone knows, all space ships need a Self-Destruct Mechanism!
  • Building on the above, imagine a pod is damaged and rockets off course after the Axiom is destroyed. Without any way to return to a habitable world, the inhabitants would probably enjoy the option of blowing themselves up rather than popping the airlock or waiting to die of thirst.
  • More importantly, having a self-destruct mechanism means that if a pod malfunctions while it's returning to the ship after a precautionary evacuation, and it threatens to collide with and rupture the Axiom's hull, it can be blown into bits too lightweight to penetrate on impact.

Alright, who decided to give the steering wheel a taser?

• When it's revealed that AUTO is secretly trying to keep the humans from returning to Earth, he uses a little electric-shock device to shock WALL•E in an attempt to get him out of the way. He later attempts to use the electroshock device against the captain himself. Secret agenda or not, who would weaponize a steering wheel?
  • Probably so that it prevents others from controlling it, sort of like self-defense.
  • It's a security feature. He's a steering wheel. This is a vital part of the system controls. Anyone who controls AUTO can command the ship. Giving AUTO the ability to fight back against a potentially mutinying crew member makes some violent upstart taking over the ship significantly harder.

Hello Dolly tape

• How did the tape of Hello Dolly last that long? Magnetic tape degrades over time- it should have been too damaged to use by the time the ships went out, much less 700 years later.
  • Maybe WALL•E figured out how to make new tape and copy it.
  • Or it wasn't a traditional tape - it was a much sturdier one made as part of a retro fad.

Why keep up the Eve probes?

• Here's a good one: AUTO's stated purpose after Directive A113 is to prevent humans from ever returning to Earth. Why, then, would the EVE probes ever be sent out in the first place? It's fairly obvious that no one on the Axiom had any idea what the deal with them was, and it's even more obvious that Eve was supposed to not find anything. So, why send the probes out at all? And if you do, why send them to Earth? Why not send them to Mars or something?
  • If you were paying attention, AUTO said something about annual reconnaissance, so sending the EVEs out was a yearly thing. At first, he probably kept sending them to make sure the humans didn't suspect anything was wrong. As time went on, the people eventually forgot what the EVEs were really for.
  • I figure there are two options. a) AUTO doesn't actually have full control over everything on the ship, and was just unable to stop the probes from being sent out. b) Whoever coded the response to A113 did a crappy job, and it didn't override the earlier directive to keep sending probes. Because of this, AUTO kept doing both until they came into direct conflict.
    • It's already been firmly established that whoever programmed AUTO didn't do the best job (hence why the captain was able to access the "classified information" just by giving a direct order, but not to override the A113 directive), so inconsistencies in its actions aren't implausible.
    • A113 was initiated on the assumption that Earth was too far gone ecologically speaking. There's no reason not to keep sending the probes even in that situation though, even from AUTO's perspective. If AUTO is operating on a correct assumption (that the earth would never recover), it has nothing to fear from the probes. They're already paid for, why go to the trouble of turning them off if they aren't expected to have any consequence, AUTO isn't evil. The glitch one would assume comes in where AUTO is given conflicting directives that it's not equipped to deal with. From AUTO's perspective, the safer option to protect the Axiom's cargo is to continue with A113. New data that contradicts A113 is therefore rejected and destroyed. Sure, more prescient programmers would have accounted for this, but by the same token a more prescient society wouldn't have made the planet unlivable.
  • Ultimately, it's a machine. It was programed to send out probes, so it sent out probes. It was programmed to prevent an earth return, so it prevented an earth return. That some of its programming made other parts of its programming problematic wasn't something it was capable of caring about or resolving organically.
  • It could be BnLs form of "three laws of robotics." Robots must follow all orders given to them by the appropriate commanders, except when those orders directly conflict with their directives. MO was told to never leave that line, but his directive is to clean the ship of foreign contaminants. Thus, MO jumped off the line to clean the mess Wall-E made. AUTO's orders were to ensure probes got to Earth, and listen to the captains orders: his directive is to make sure the Axiom does not go back to Earth. It takes quite a bit of "will" power from a robot to ignore their directives (Eve down in the trash room).

Fire extinguisher design

• Why, 700 years in the future, are there fire extinguishers that look exactly like the ones we have today? You'd think they'd have improved the design or simply made them automatic, especially on a ship as impressive as the Axiom. Given, it was an escape pod, but still...
  • Well, the ship was designed in late 21st/early 22nd century, so the standards could be the same as the present; or they just like retro.
  • If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The basic fire-extinguisher design has been in use for centuries for a reason.

Surviving on Earth

• So at the end of the movie, EVE and WALL•E are living happy, the humans are back on Earth, and the Captain is enthusiastically leading everyone to a bright future in which there's enough "vegetable plants! And pizza plants!" to go around. Here's a silly question: what about the nasty sandstorms?
  • In the commentary, one of the creators asked about the sandstorms killing everyone, to which one of the others replied, "Hey, you know they've got this gigantic shelter to protect them. That's what the Axiom is for."
    • A brief shot in the credits shows a group of people using the escape pods as shelter while they cook around an open fire. If they can survive re-entry (as EVE didn't seem to worry about WALL•E's safety when she shoved him in one to send him back to Earth) they can probably survive a dust storm or two.

Whose idea was it to make the life-seeking probe so trigger-happy?

• Why was EVE trying to kill anything that moved in the beginning?
  • Self preservation.
  • She was scanning for plant life. If it moved enough, it probably wasn't a plant, and therefore, killable.
  • Because nobody on the Axiom, AUTO included, had any idea what the probes would find on Earth. Remember that the probes were probably designed at the same time as the rest of the Axiom, and nobody at the time the ship was being designed could know exactly what was going to happen to the entire Biosphere during humanity's absence. In the hypothetical event of vengeful mole people or some other such scenario in which organic life is actively threatening the probes, the probes would need to be able to protect themselves. It's absolutely true that any lifeform capable of threatening a probe is proof that the Earth can sustain life again, but that information is meaningless if the probe does not survive to return to the Axiom with the proof. If all the probes that discover the mole people are destroyed by the mole people, then the only probes returning are coming back empty-handed, thus proving that Earth still can't sustain life. Putting weapons on the probes prevent this scenario.
    • The probes' designers were also obviously familiar with robots going rogue. For all they knew, the Wall-Es might have Turned Against Their Masters in the past few centuries, which helps explain EVE's initial suspicions upon meeting one.

Earth's water

• Where did all the water go? Where did it come from when it came back?
  • There is water on Earth, as seen when WALL-E is paddling through what seems to be a factory cooling pool during he and EVE’s “date”. Granted, there’s something seriously wrong with that water given how viscous it is, but it’s water nonetheless. The shots that show Earth from space also show that not only do the Great Lakes still exist, the oceans are just as big as they always have been. There’s also the fact that there are still rainstorms.
  • Climate change?
    • Most long-term climate change models involve an initial rise in ocean levels (as sources of inland ice disappear), then a withdrawal (as the absence of snow/ice lowers the planet's albedo and raises mean temperature, accelerating evaporation and leaving the planet too warm for new ice/snow areas to form.)
    • The water didn't "go" anywhere. If the infrastructure would collapse now, many cities and many crop fields would became desert, since the natural growth of plants was disrupted. Having mountains of trash wouldn't help, either.
    • The water might have gone to the natural places where it should go: oceans, rivers... The harbor shown in the movie might have been an artificial one, higher than the planetary zero level of water and kept wet only via dams and water gates. No humans to operate them meant the water slowly went away and the ships slowly sat in the sand. Actually, there is a scene where some oil ships fell down like dominoes after one of them is hit by Eve. That might suggest that the ships were sitting in a very fragile equilibrium, compatible with the theory of them slowly going down and resting on the bottom of the bay.
    • When people started growing stuff again, the water was simply brought from where it was to be used to replant and regrow the vegetation.
  • There's still water: remember the thunderstorms that WALL•E tries to shelter Eve from.

Staring at screens

• How come nobody who spent their entire life staring at a computer screen suffers from chronic, throbbing headaches?
  • Selective breeding and/or genetic engineering. They did have 700 years to get used to it, after all.
  • The holoscreen technology is obviously very advanced.
    • The majority of headaches from computer screens results from low refresh rates. LC Ds and newer technology don't actually refresh the entire screen (only the pixels that change from frame to frame are changed) which removes the flicker problem. The idea of a 'refresh' rate is mostly retained because it makes more sense to people as a unit of measurement.

Why not stay on Earth?

• Why go through all the effort of launching a colony spaceship if it was intended to just go back to Earth when it's habitable again? Wouldn't underground colonies like Fallout's vaults be easier and more efficient?
  • Cruise ships are more marketable.
  • They may have suspected that it really wasn't possible to clean up the Earth. The space ships were a way to protect humanity in the event of the plan's failure.
    • Indeed, Override Directive A-113 is exactly that. It had to have been thought of before the Axiom left, so that AUTO would know what Forthright was talking about when he invoked it.
  • Depends on variations in technology. It seems as if VTOL into space is no longer a big deal: if it's cheaper to construct and lift megatons of starships than it is to excavate, ventilate and maintain huge underground complexes, then they'd go that route. (Of course, maybe they have done both and we just don't know about it.)
  • Also there are certain resources that are easier to find in space, like water and certain minerals, send a few bots to mine asteroid and comets and you have raw material for new stuffs and water, whilst underground water and certain material will became scarce with time.

Far out!

• If the Axiom was just some place for the humans to stay while the Earth was being clean up, why did they have to go that far away? Couldn't they have just orbited Earth? It's not as if the space around it would be dangerous. All going so far seems to have accomplished was made it so they couldn't look at Earth, made sending probes much more difficult, and screwing them over if their hyperdrive was broken.
  • Why would it "screw them over" if their hyperdrive was broken? They can fix it. They're entirely self-sufficient after all.
  • It was a cruise. Remember how dirty the shots of Earth proved it to be, even from a distance? Nobody wants to spend their cruise looking at brown on brown.
  • Its possible that they were around, say, Jupiter at first for the above reason, but when the A113 directive came, AUTO took them out farther to reduce chances of anybody noticing.
  • Don't forget all those derelict satellites that're still adrift in orbit around Earth. Even today, Real Life space junk can be a serious problem for space missions; the last thing Axiom needs is to try to navigate through that mess for prolonged periods.

Was it necessary to land first?

• Why did the Axiom's probe carrier have to land to deploy EVE? She can fly. She can operate in space. And she obviously has plenty of on-board power. The probe carrier could have deployed her capsule from orbit where EVE could have guided the re-entry and discarded the capsule once in the atmosphere. After securing a plant sample EVE could return to orbit before going into beacon mode.
  • The situation on Earth's orbit in WALL•E is pretty bad. There are tens of thousands of sattelites without any control. It means that trash is creating more trash, in turn creating a mess of metal moving at escape velocity which is completely impossible to pass through unharmed. EVE units need an armored ship to ram through that on the way in and out.
  • Did you see how much junk was in orbit? Also, although we do know that EVE can travel in space, we don't know that her on-board energy reserves are sufficient for her to get back into high orbit after an extended survey period. Remember, she shut down everything except standby propulsion and internal climate control when she went into beacon mode.
    • EVE alone would have had an easier time maneuvering through that junk rather than having the probe carrier punch through it twice and risk damaging itself. As for EVE's power reserves, she packs an ion cannon that hits like a small nuke and is deployed at the smallest provocation. She can go supersonic and sustain it without breaking a sweat. And during the chase aboard the Axiom she was flitting all over the place at high speed while carrying WALL•E and blasting away at anything in her path without once stopping for a recharge. Seems to me she's got juice to spare. Going from surface to orbit shouldn't have used more than a fraction of the power she was flaunting throughout the movie.
    • I must disagree. EVE has lots of energy on-board, and her weapon is very high-powered - but it also has a long cycle time for its more powerful shots. Let's say that EVE needs to clear high Earth orbit to get about the debris field (reasonable, since after seven hundred years, orbital decay would have cleared everything but the highest orbitals). If she's of any even marginally reasonable mass, say 25kg, she'd need as much onboard energy as the entire fuel supply of a Titan II at a minimum. It takes enormous amounts of energy to reach high orbit (low orbit is a lot easier).
    • Counter-point. EVE's cannon clearly has its own power source, since it is capable of firing a fully powered blast even when disconnected from EVE's body and its (EVE's) own power source.
    • Depends on how long she takes to achieve orbit. Rockets take a lot of fuel because they reach orbit in a relatively short period of time from launch. Not to mention they have high initial take-off weights. EVE could simply fly while constantly increasing her altitude to the edge of the atmosphere. From there simple orbital mechanics takes over as a low but constant thrust will increase her orbital altitude over time. Her only complication will be jinking to avoid the orbital debris. We've already experimented with using aircraft to carry small rockets to high altitude and then launching them to orbit with much smaller fuel requirements.
    • True, but that only shifts the energy requirements from the rocket to the plane. EVE has no plane or other external vehicle to piggyback on; all the energy she needs to rise over fifty thousand miles has to come from her internal reserves. Those reserves are large, no doubt, but apparently not quite that large. Though why her pod wasn't initially deployed from orbit is beyond me.
  • It's a stretch considering all her other features, but just because you can survive in space doesn't mean you're properly heat-shielded for atmospheric entry/exit. Especially, now that I think about it, while carrying such delicate and important cargo (aka the plant).
    • She would only need heat shielding for re-entry and her capsule could provide that. That's how we deploy planetary probes today.
  • EVE has enough thrust to reach low supersonic speeds (say Mach 1-2), but probably not enough thrust to reach escape velocity of Mach 34. Therefore she needs a big armored ship to get off Earth anyway, so why not have it deliver her too and save her some wear and tear?
    • She doesn't need to reach escape velocity, only orbital velocity. She could place herself in a parking orbit then go into beacon mode. The carrier could then retrieve her without the risks of a planetary landing.
    • She doesn't even need to reach "orbital velocity" the way a rocket does, either. EVE's inertialess drive allows her to hover and fly straight up, and it works just as well in vacuum as it does in atmosphere. There's nothing stopping her from flying straight up until she gets out of the atmosphere. Once she's up there, she can keep accelerating faster and faster until she's in a stable orbit without having to worry about air resistance. And all this without having to achieve the kind of massive accelerations that today's rockets use.
  • Regarding Eve's power reserves, its worth noting that she only does a few bits of flashy flying when she's dropped off, then gets down to her mission. It's not really clear how long she's on earth before WALL•E shows her the plant, but it didn't appear to be more than a few days. Then she rides all the way back to the Axiom (presumably charging along the way), and the Axiom plot takes place over the course of one day. Her energy reserves might not be as big as we're assuming.
  • The simple and straightforward answer is a matter of pragmatism. It saves energy for EVE if she doesn't have to also be equipped to go into space. It might waste energy over all, but if she's expected to survival without any support for unknown periods of time, it's better that she be able to store as much energy as possible and also not have to worry about twice-per-mission equipment that's critical to success. Better to have the probe ship.
  • It might also be just a matter of timing - if EVE is a yearly probe, it may be that that the schedule is this. Axiom launches a probe ship with an EVE. Ship lands, drops off EVE. Takes off for a sub-orbital hop to another EVE probe elsewhere on the planet and picks her up. Return to Axiom. Repeat.

Leave and return

• Why do the shuttles for the EVE probes not stay on Earth while they're scouting the planet, instead of wasting a trip leaving the planet just to have to return and pick them up later?
  • EVE units' trips to Earth normally last years while they scour the entire planet for non-existent plant life — too much time for her delivery ship to be exposed to the elements and possibly damaged.

Weren't there better ways of dealing with the problem?

• Buy n Large made the WALL•Es, the EVEs, and all the other robots. They have figured out how to make a self-sustaining pseudoenvironment inside a spaceship. It's implied on this very page that matter duplication was available long before they left Earth. And yet they couldn't come up with a better waste-management plan back on Earth than "fly off and let a bunch of tiny robots deal with it"? Heck, even putting all the crap into spacefaring garbage trucks and ejecting it into the great beyond would be viable, and we have the technology (if not the resources) for that now.
  • According to the commentary and bonus material on the DVD, the WALL•Es were part of a team. After they compacted the trash, the cubes would be swallowed up by the giant mining robots WALL•E passes on the way home. These robots each had some kind of matter disassembler that would recycle or incinerate the material in the cubes. The effort was abandoned when the WALL•Es finally hit soil and the soil was found to be too toxic. It was judged impractical to dig up large portions of the Earth's soil for cleaning. What technology failed to accomplish, 700 years of sunlight and natural oxidation eventually did.
  • I think it was also mentioned that almost all of the WALL•E units failed to activate properly- a single glitch screwed up the entire operation and nobody got around to fixing it. If things hadn't gone wrong... well, look what WALL•E managed to do all by himself, building an entire cityscape of trash cube skyscrapers. Imagine what a few dozen of him could have done!
    • Except the size of the trash cube piles are meant to show how alone he is and that he has been at it for a LONG time. Combined with that the Axiom was supposed to be in space for only 5 years and even after 700 years it is unclear how effective WALL•E has been. The WALL•Es would have failed because they had no replacement parts (notice how in the storage container/transport WALL•E lives in there is only space for the robots themselves and no extra parts). It makes the WALL•Es seem like a futile gesture to save Earth.

How is all the trash still there?

• Forget how could a video tape could last that long, how could ANY of that trash have lasted that long? The most stoutly built skyscraper would only last approximately 200-300 years. Cars would be heaps of rust in less than fifty. Iron, steel, concrete, wood, paper, plastic... No material made by man exposed to the elements would last beyond the 400 year mark and most would disintegrate within a century. Even most of the space junk would have tumbled out of orbit and burned up from reentry. After 700 years, there would literally be no trace whatsoever that human beings had walked the planet.
  • In-universe: Buy n Large products are just that durable (see the cash/coupons still on the floor of the BNL ultra store; a five-year space cruise stretches into 700 with relatively little ill effects on the passengers or "crew"), which is why the earth is still covered in junk. Real life: The director stated that the After Humanity setting was just Rule of Cool and that Act 1 pretty much wrote itself; the dates probably came up when they were writing Act 2. Personally I think it should've been more like a 350-year span, but MST3K Mantra and all that.
  • The biggest culprits for disassembling human structures are other living things. Dirt covers the roads, plants grow and hold it in place. Roots worm their way into cracks in concrete, then expand and break it up. Animals take up residence in skyscrapers, etc. But on WALL•E's Earth, those entities do not exist. They're all dead. So dirt just gets blown away by the next sandstorm. Concrete has to weather away through sheer erosion. From those documentaries, the human structures that will last the longest will be the Pyramids, owing largely to their placement in deserts lacking vegetation. Now imagine the whole world is like that.
    • Which itself leads to more Fridge Logic: Earth's surface remaining even nominally habitable depends entirely on the ecology removing excess gasses like methane and CO2 from the atmosphere. Without photosynthetic life, bacteria and volcanic action would serve to render the atmosphere less and less friendly to life, until finally there's enough to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect.
    • Whether this could happen in a 700-year timespan is up for debate, though. If Earth is well and truly dead, then even decay bacteria are gone and dead biomass won't rot, and thus won't its stored carbon back into the atmosphere. This would slow down the warming process considerably.
    • Long story short, they didn't do the research. No matter how MUCH garbage their was, even with ZERO lifeforms on the planet (and there WERE lifeforms; even cockroaches need an ecosystem), they still had an atmosphere, climate, wind, rain, sun, cold.... Iron rusts, concrete corrodes, plastics and chemicals degrade into their constituent elements (and quite rapidly under ultraviolet light). By 100 years, much less 700, what little hadn't decomposed or corroded or dissolved would have been covered in several hundred feet of sand, silt, loam and clay (aka DIRT.) Which would in turn have been overgrown by plants like the one EVE found. Even at the most generous estimate, WALL•E should have spent the last century or so puttering around in a nascent forest.
  • The A113 Override was sent out in 2110, and by the time WALL•E and EVE reach the Axiom, it's the year 277X. Now, the Axiom has hyperspace capacity, but the ship carrying EVE/WALL•E doesn't. After A113 was recieved, why would AUTO have kept on sending out probes? Sure, inertia and habit make a good argument, but the pilot doesn't seem to really know they even are there, except "they always come back negative"... Couldn't AUTO just stop sending out probes and just not mention them again? I think there could be a simpler explanation to all this. If the 2110 date is 5 years after the end of the 5-year cruise (the first "log" the ship has seems to be from 2100, although that could just be a memory cut-off), then it's possible that AUTO stopped sending out probes a few years afterwards (or perhaps even instantly). However, by that time, the ship has probably gone pretty far. When you've got a hyperdrive, why bother sticking to the Sol System? Why not visit Alpha Centauri, Andromaeda, and a couple other pretty parts of space? If it was intended anything like a cruise, they'd have planned a "sight" every few days. So if they were sufficiently far away, the probe sent in 2109 could have taken 300+ years (even at near-light speed) to reach earth, and just as long (if not more) to get back. I like to think that WALL•E has only been around for 150-200 years (it's circa 2250 when the story starts), but takes 500-550 years to get "back" to the Axiom (possibly because AUTO doesn't really care about the probes and is hopping around using the hyperdrive). It's probably not canon though.
    • This doesn't quite work for a number of reasons: The least of them is that it is implied that the same cockroach is waiting (in what is definitely the same derelict heavy vehicle) for the whole time WALL•E is away. More serious is the fact that the condition of the city when the Axiom lands is not significantly different than it was when WALL•E left. It simply can't be a long time that he's away.

Trash ejection

• Why do EVE and WALL•E try so desperately not to get ejected with the garbage? They were in space just a short while ago. They could easily get back in again.
  • EVE was more concerned with protecting WALL•E, who was severely damaged and needed to be tended to immediately. Besides, seeing as that the doors to the Axiom have a bad habit of locking people out (just ask BURN-E), it was probably better she not risk it.

Burn-E

• Regarding BURN-E - Why were the maintenance ports designed to close the moment ANYTHING passes through them? I mean, anything passing through upon the tracks, I could understand. The ship does need to close them. But what if some debris goes through? A ship the size of the axiom must have SOME gravitational pull- probably enough to bring in any space-debris it passes. So, BURN-E goes out, door remains open, METEOR passes through door, door closes. Now you have damage to the inside of the ship, and one less maintenance droid, as the animation shows they only open from one side. But why not simply open them when something approaches the door on the tracks, close them when they pass through, (or simply go past), and then do the same from the outside?
  • I think they'd just use the wielding torch to destroy the door (and fix it later) like BURN-E did at the end. Only reason why he didn't consider it before that is because he's silly.
  • The Axiom may be big, but it's also hollow to allow things to move around inside it, so its mass is much lower than you might expect. Space debris also tends to be moving very, VERY quickly, and something as small as the Axiom isn't likely to attract it unless it happens to be moving at relatively the same velocity. That being said, the doors appear to be stupid enough that a meteor that happened to intercept the doors probably would close them.
  • Or the doors are designed to close when an Axiom robot enters it. The designers just never considered the option that any other robot would enter what is obviously a maintenance door (in outer space).
  • How do we know it was automatic? If memory serves, EVE was distracted by carrying WALL•E in her arms at that point. Fly in, hit the Close Door button, get back to business.
    • ^ This is actually a good point. Spaceships don't have doors. They have airlocks. Any door on a spaceship is designed to be open to the ship interior or to space. Never both at the same time. EVE probably cycled the airlock, and that's how BURN-E got locked outside the ship.

Humans atrophying

• If the humans have been on the ship for 700 years, wouldn't their immune systems have atrophied? Wouldn't they have died or at least become massively sick once they got back to Earth?
  • AUTO has been taking very, very, very good care of them. Chances are that they were receiving regular vaccines as part of some preprogrammed in passenger maintenance routine intended for if any kids were born on the five year mission, which was then extended to the whole 700 years and many entire lifespans.
  • If enough life on Earth died out, perhaps there just aren't many diseases around any-more by the time the Axiom returns. The germs would have to start developing all over again, right along with the Axiom passengers' immune systems.
    • Another interpretation is that while the ship is tightly controlled its not germ and bacteria free so that people would have immune systems when they got back to Earth.

How did Mo handle the return?

• If M-O is an extreme Neat Freak and even went completely berserk after just seeing WALL•E, how is it that he was even able to function at all on the trashed up Earth? His cleaning directive seemed relentless throughout the film until that scene.
  • Well, we know that by the end of the film M-O can at least ignore his directive (as he identifies but does not try to clean the plant during the holo-detector scene). It seems M-O was too concerned about WALL•E's condition to take notice of all the "Foreign Contaminants," even if his warning system was going crazy. Perhaps after the film ended, when he was no longer focused on WALL•E, it did become aggravating, at which point he had to be reprogrammed.

terly destroy the foreign boot and foreign plant but helps deliver them to EVE.

• A good explaination is that M-O had two sets of directives; one for the Axiom and one for Earth. On the Axiom, he was programmed to be ruthless about contaminants because it could ruin the delicate quarantine of the ship. Now that he's on Earth, his different set of protocols activate, which would worry more about dangerous contaminants or keeping machinery clean from the elements. The ship was designed to come back, so it makes sense that the robots could be shifted to working elsewhere on Earth.

Acronyms

• What is the acronym in Auto's name supposed to be?
  • Auto isn't an Acronym. It's short for Automatic Pilot.

Burn-E's name

• What does "BURN-E" stand for?

  • On Pixar's official site, they refer to him as "BURN-E (Basic Utility Repair Nano Engineer)".

Surviving on Earth

• So, while Earth was being rebuilt and while they waited for that one little boot seedling to grow, what exactly did those people eat? From what we're shown, their food consists of milkshakes daily. If the Axiom was taken offline (for lack of a better term) when it landed on Earth again, would...whatever the hell it is that makes those food shakes stop functioning? Surely they didn't try turning AUTO back on.
  • I don't see why it would stop. All the other robots on the ship seem to be autonomous, there's no reason the milkshake robots aren't.
  • The credits montage seem to imply that figuring out how to fish, farm and such was a gradual process. The Axiom probably functioned as a combined hotel, hospital and diner during that process.

Maintenance freak-out

• Why does WALL•E freak out when EVE is in maintenance? Earlier in the film, it is shown how he changes his "shoes" and gouges his "eye" out and replaces it. He must have changed his own parts hundreds of times before that, so he should know the difference between robot mutilation and maintenance.
  • Pay more attention to the scene. WALL•E only sees it through a screen, and a combination of what's being done to her, and sounds from another bot being worked on which sound like screams makes WALL•E assume the worst.

Oxygen

• How do the people breathe after getting off the Axiom? I don't think one plant will provide oxygen for an entire planet. And how would there be more types of veggies? I think "plant" would get kinda boring after a while.
  • As mentioned above, they probably sent the EV Es and/or a shuttle over the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault for the seeds to start agriculture anew, and they had the food stores and/or matter converters of the Axiom to last the first few harvests as they get their farmer legs. As for oxygen, nobody'd been using it in 700 years, so enough was left from before everyone left to last until they got plants going, plus I'm guessing that non-edible oceanic algae was making oxygen, probably in increasing quantities over time as the oceanic pollutants wash ashore and/or settle.
  • Firstly, we are shown that there are more plants on Earth than just the one brought to the Axiom. As our closeup view of Earth is pretty much limited to a single city, there might be thriving rain forest elsewhere. Or it progressed to prehistoric times, where oxygen were produced by bacteria rather than plants.

Developing self-awareness

• Presumably, the reason WALL•E has managed to survive was because he developed a sense of self-awareness. Whereas all the other WALL•Es simply worked until they degraded due to lack of maintenance, the surviving WALL•E was able to identify when he needed repairs and would horde functional parts from 'dead' bots to preserve himself. So my question is, why was WALL•E the only bot to develop a repair instinct, out of the millions that must have been deployed on Earth? Surely they're all manufactured identically, so what allowed this one single unit to adapt where each and every other failed? And furthermore, what kind of AI developer would overlook the critical need for a robot working in Earth's conditions for an indefinite length of time to be programmed with an autonomous repair instict as standard?
  • I got the impression WALL•E‘s first unusual, non-programmed quality was his curiosity and tendency to collect stuff (as a bonus, these are typical qualities among non-standard humans too!). He grew this into collecting spare parts for himself which extended his lifespan enormously
  • Like you said, the only source of spare parts for WALL•Es were other WALL•Es. Work it out from here.
  • It was stated that WALL•E was still running because someone missed him when the rest of the WALL•Es were turned off.
  • The WALL•Es were never meant to work for an indefinite amount of time. The plan was to send everyone into space for five years while the Earth was being cleaned (which we all know failed). Considering how confident BnL were that they'd be finished in five years, they didn't plan for the WALL•Es working for a long period of time, or without repair workers on stand-by.
  • Is there any evidence that Wall-E was the last survivor? Yes he was the only one still around in that area, but Earth is huge. For all we know other individuals exist in Europe, Australia, China, South America, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if several dozen survived, but they are separated by such vast distances that they never run across each other. After all, it's not like they have scanners or communication devices to talk to each other from the other side of the planet, at least, not any more with all the satellites and communication towers down.

Animals

• What happened to animals?
  • Some would go extinct, while others (like roaches) would survive.
  • Considering that the credits show many Earth species, it's possible that the cruise ships carried specimens with them.

Pronunciation

• So the Captain can read and pronounce the word "acquisition", but he can't pronounce "manual"?
  • Language changes over time. It's reasonable to assume that "acquisition" remained a part of the common vernacular while "manual" fell out of use.
  • It's a joke. The entire Axiom lifestyle is based around consumerism eg acquiring things. More over, they do so without having to do anything themselves; everything is provided for them. They don't have to do anything manually.

He knows what flowers are?

• In the BURN-E short, while BURN-E is trapped on the outside of the ship, he whiles away the time by using his torch to burn an impression of a flower into the hull. How does he know what a flower is?
  • Basic knowledges programmed in and/or he saw holograms of them designed to entertain the passengers.
  • If part of his job is to repair lighting units, he probably has been to whatever the Axiom uses for an arboretum and seen flowers while on the job.

Secret directive

• So, what was the point of the top-secret order about not returning to Earth? Theoretically, this was supposed to be a five-year cruise for humanity while the Earth was cleaned up by robots. If things went awry and the passengers weren't allowed to return, surely the first generation of passengers would have eventually noticed it had been more than five years. Presumably, at that point they'd have been told there was a problem and they'd head back to Earth whenever the probes came back positive and/or whenever the environment was safe again. So why was the order a secret? I can't see a reason for it unless the intention was to prevent the ships from returning even if the probes came back positive... but that just raises further questions. For example, what's the point of outfitting a five-year cruise ship with an elaborate system for eventually returning to Earth in the event of environmental catastrophe if you're just going to override that system in the event of environmental catastrophe?
  • Because environmental catastrophe isn't sudden. The A113 override was given when it was determined that Earth would never be habitable again. There was still life on Earth at the time. It was slowly dying, but it was there. The CEO was rather explicitly sending the transmission from the surface of the planet. Now, the emergency protocol has the probes going out looking for vegetation as proof that Earth is habitable again. Imagine if, one or two years after the A113 was sent out, EVE returned with a dying plant from the dying surface, and the fleet returned to Earth thinking it was now habitable again when, in fact, it was in its dying throes? Now all humanity is trapped on the surface to die with the rest of the planet because they mistook the soon-to-be withered carcass of a dying plant for hope.
  • There's also a big difference between, "We planned to go back in five years, but when we checked, we found it wasn't ready yet, so we're going to hold off for a bit and check again later," and "We so totally fucked our planet that, even as we're launching you right now, we never plan to go back because it's so totally screwed."

Death customs

• What do they do with the corpse when a passenger in the Axiom dies?
  • Cremate them and eject the ashes.

Oversized plant specimen

• What if EVE detected a plant too big for her to carry?
  • Either she uses some kind of shrink ray, or she carefully separates the most ideal part of the plant using a special tool that allows it to be repaired later.
  • She sends back for the lander unit so several EV Es can load it aboard?
  • Remember, EVE was programmed by B&L. She'd blast it into splinters, pick a piece to recover, and call it a day.
  • There's no indication that the plant specimen had to be replantable later; she could just as easily take a couple of leaves from it and bring those back. Even if it did have to be replantable, it's possible to take a small piece of a plant, plant the broken end in the ground, and have it regrow into a clone of the original plant; so even then she could still get away with taking only a branch back.
  • When WALL-E first shows EVE the plant, her little scanny-beam thing appears to “zero in” on the plant just before she goes into hibernation. It’s possible that was her way of verifying that the specimen was small enough to be carried. As for cutting off a piece of a larger plant, it’s mentioned that the Holo-Detector requires a viable specimen of ongoing photosynthesis, and photosynthesis doesn’t last that long if a part of the plant is cut off. They must have had some other way of collecting such a specimen if one of the probes had found one.

Captain selection

• If everyone on the Axiom just sits around doing nothing and there doesn't seem to be ranks to move up through or anything, how do they decide who gets to be the captain?
  • I figured they ask for volunteers. That's why the one person with a desire to do anything is captain.
  • There might be a placement test. "Is crashing a good thing? Yes/No. Do you like shiny buttons? Yes/No."

Waterproofing the robotic staff

• Why isn't the robot next to the pool waterproof? Yes, it's a funny gag, but that's the one robot on the ship that NEEDS waterproofing.
  • Because that’s not a robot, it’s just a speaker that moves up and down on a metal pole.

Turning off the Wall-Es

• Why did BnL decide to turn the Wall-Es off when they decided that Earth was uninhabitable? Especially since the EVE probes continued to be sent to search for plant life, showing that one end of Operation: Recolonize was still being upheld, and the fact that it took the one Wall-E that they neglected to shut down a mere 700 years on his own to clean up enough trash for a plant to be able to grow...Even if the president ended up leaving Earth afterwards, wouldn't just leaving them all on get the job done sooner?
  • I don't recall anything saying BnL switched off the Wall-E program. Judging from the condition of the other bots seen at the start of the film, it looks like they all worked themselves to death.
    • For what it's worth, part of the movie description on Pixar's own website is "What if mankind had to leave earth and somebody forgot to turn the last robot off?"

Why such a convoluted plan?

• Why does Auto go to such lengths in order to get rid of the plant the first time by telling GO-4 to launch it into an escape pod set to self-destruct? Is there a reason why he couldn't just drop it down the trash chute?
  • Good point. Those escape pods might become important at some point... The best theory I can come up with is that Auto didn't get specific: he directed GO-4 to "get it off the ship" rather than destroying it.
  • WALL-E and EVE helpfully demonstrate that something dumped down the trash chute is not immediately unrecoverable; he might have figured launching it into a pod primed to explode was a quicker and more permanent solution.

Auto helping out

• When EVE first returns to Axiom with the plant, an automated message plays instructing the captain to refer to the operations manual in order to begin the return procedure. When he picks up the manual, he has no idea how to use it (presumably having never seen a book in his life), and Auto has to open it for him. Which begs the question: why did Auto open the manual? And completely unprompted, no less. If he hadn't opened the book, the captain couldn't have started the return procedure (I'm guessing that, given how lazy humanity is by that point, he probably would have given up on trying to figure it out pretty quickly). Or better yet, Auto could have just destroyed the manual decades ago and then the captain would have had no idea how to initiate the return procedure.
  • We see that the captain's interest was peaked from the moment the button started flashing - odds are eventually he would've just asked for Auto to open the book anyway. Since Auto had already gotten rid of the plant by that point, it was better for him to play along and help the captain anyway, to make himself look more innocent and point the finger at Eve by labeling her memory faulty.
  • Because it's a machine. Auto does what he's programmed to do, even when one part of his programing makes another part of his programming more difficult. It's the kind of robot that, if programmed to repair a wall and destroy a wall, would blast the wall to pieces, put the wall back together, blast it, again and again forever without ever caring in the slightest about how contradictory its programming is. Only the "defective" robots like WALL-E have the ability to think outside the box needed to reject absurd programming.

Why was it classified?

• Why was Eve's directive classified? Yes, it's very important, but who did Bn L think she would meet on Earth who would want to know about it, especially for any malicious reasons?
  • Simply because she's part of a high-level plan to try and repopulate the Earth, which isn't something that should be revealed to just anyone who asks. She may not be expected to encounter anyone on Earth, but keeping it classified does protect it from anyone she might come across on the Axiom.

That's now how gravity works!

• When Auto tilts the Axiom, what is it that causes the passengers to start sliding down toward the windows? The Axiom generates its own artificial gravity, and it's surrounded by the empty vacuum of space, so unless Bn L designed Auto to also control the ship's pull of gravity, which wouldn't make much sense, it shouldn't matter whether he turns the ship sideways, upside-down, or starts doing loop-dee-loops. Since the only force acting on the passengers is within the floors of the Axiom, the floors are exactly where they should stay.
  • It makes perfect sense that Auto would have control of whatever is generating the artificial gravity, being the ship's AI.
    • Auto isn't the ship's AI, he's just the autopilot, and has no awareness or control beyond the bridge. Also, if Auto could somehow adjust the gravity himself, there would be no reason to tilt the whole ship to do so. Also also, righting the ship after Auto was switched off wouldn't have fixed the gravity. The whole concept is pure artistic license.
  • Both the tilt and gravity shift aided Auto's plan—tilting the ship is what causes the plant to be knocked out of WALL-E's hands as the Holo-Detector shifts relative to him and EVE, and the gravity shift means the dropped plant is immediately lost in the crowd. So even if they functioned separately, Auto had reason to do both.

Other forms of life

• If there are robots that look for plants on Earth, are there others that do the same with animals/microbes/etc?
  • I'd imagine any animals remaining on Earth would've either died out by now or adapted to survive in its much more hostile environments, meaning their survival wouldn't be a good indicator of whether sustaining humans is possible. But if a plant can survive there, humans probably can too. (Never mind how plants are necessary to produce oxygen.)

Trash still there

• At the end of the movie, when the humans arrive back on Earth and are shown rebuilding civilization, what would they have done with all the garbage still on the surface?
  • The implication of the last shot was that they were recycling it or using it for compost.

Trash skyscrapers

• Alright, so the WALL•E robots compacted trash and arranged the resultant waste cubes into massive, skyscraper-like stacks. But what were they intended to do with said trash once all is said and done? I mean, burning them would only release more crap into the atmosphere, which is implied to be why the Earth became unsustainable anyway. And they can't just leave them there; one wrong move and the entire pile might come crashing down, rendering seven centuries' worth of work moot and possibly killing several people in the process.
  • The original plan was to incinerate the trash; you can see Wall-E pass by the defunct incinerators during his commute at the beginning of the movie. (They're those towering machines that look a little like cranes.) As for whether that would've made things worse, it's important to remember that Buy-n-Large was trying to be seen as though they were doing something to help the situation and keeping humanity safe more than they were trying to find a practical solution. They didn't realize how ineffectual their cleanup plan was until after the Earth had been evacuated, which is why they decided it would be better for everyone to remain in space.
  • WALL•E robots are likely not programmed to make the trash into skyscrapers. We're only shown a single one doing it; the one that the film follows. And this particular WALL•E robot developed lots of human-like traits that wouldn't make sense on a WALL•E unit, such as carrying a lunchbox to "work" and watching movies for fun. The desire to make tall buildings could easily be one of them.

Out the airlock

• The scene where WALL•E and EVE are about to be Thrown Out the Airlock is clearly played for drama and tension with dark, ominous lighting, giant robots, and alarms warning of eventual decompression. However, by this point in the story we have been shown that this "dire" situation actually poses no real threat to the protagonists. We know the robots can survive the vacuum of space, we know that EVE can fly, we see that the garbage cubes are just tossed out to drift slowly away, and we see that EVE frees herself from the cube in minutes. Had they been ejected, the worst case is that they would have been delayed a few minutes as EVE and WALL-E try to find their way back into the ship and with EVE's plasma blaster, she could always make her own entrance if needed.
  • The trash doesn’t really “drift slowly away”; pay attention to what happens when M-O gets jammed between the inner airlock doors. All that trash is being flung out of the airlock due to being suddenly exposed to the vacuum of space. EVE would have a pretty hard time trying to chase after and free WALL-E from a giant trash cube that was sent flying in some random direction and is now spinning violently around in zero-G.

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