an attempted contribution to Mayo and Kermod on 5Live

Dear Linus and Schroeder,

Following the learned Doctor's evaluation of Wall-E and his justified insistence of it's clear ancestral debt to Silent Running, ET and Short Circuit, I wondered whether he had also considered a striking thematic resemblence to another, more primordial film of just last year - There Will be Blood. Indeed, the opening salvos of both films involve minimal dialogue for a barely bearable extended period, where our lone protagonists toil blindly in the face of a cruelly indifferent world, carrying out what both believe to be their sole life purpose.

Both films offer bleak but shatteringly effective fables of the futile and corruptive nature of greed, untempered capitalism and an over-consumptive society. There Will Be Blood could indeed be seen as a (very) distant precursor to what is the eventual result of these contemptible human preoccupations in Wall-E, where Earth is no longer habitable and we have enforced our own Exodus.

Moreover, there are distinct echos of Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview in the name of Fred Willard's Shelby Forthright in Wall-E, are there not? Forthright is the last and therefore definitive example in Wall-E of human, unsustainable, over-expeniture, completing the line that starts in Plainview's raw urges for the black gold. There are other parallels too but point made, I think.