This is how the world ends

This is a scene from "WALL-E" - the video game, not the movie. (Such images of the film as Pixar has released are of its cute heroes, and happy scenes of space travel.) I saw the film yesterday, and found it delightful - it's Pixar after all, visually ravishing, witty and allusive - but ultimately very sad (the melancholy of Hal, ET, they're all in there). This is Chicago 700 years after a company called Buy & Large has built luxury spacecraft for all human beings to evacuate while garbage-compacting robots like WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class) clean up our thoroughly polluted planet. Notice that one of the skyscrapers is really a pile of compacted cubes of rubbish, part of a stunning cityscape. Views of ravaged cities are commonplaces in sci-fi movies, but this one is especially haunting - all life has vanished so it's silent except for periodic windstorms; WALL-E seems to be the only robot left, too. (His only friend, the inevitable Disney animal sidekick, is an indestructible cockroach - the last frontier after last year's rats.) Civilization, and all life on earth, were destroyed not by war or invasion or disease but just by endless consumerism. This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

([SPOILER ALERT:] Human beings do survive, though more like Eloi bean-bags, and their return to earth at the movie's end and the consequent renaissance of art and culture seem the falsest movie promise yet. Not likely. Game Over.)