Sadly, while Pixar did yet another stellar job with the animation and general storytelling in Wall-E, there were a lot of plot holes that made it difficult to really enjoy the movie. For example, it was more than "worrisome" that the movie had Wall-E find the all-important plant inside a closed refrigerator where obviously no sunlight was available. And then the same plant manages to be exposed to the cold of deep space, without protection, and yet have no ill effects. It would have been flash-frozen in an instant.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of other problems I saw:

1. If humans were bad enough to pollute the Earth, how come they hadn't managed to pollute the (much smaller) spaceship that was their new home?

2. Along the same lines, how come the clean-up crew on Earth was a bunch of little Wall-Es when the clean-up robots on the spaceship were huge and obviously capable of handling the work better?

3. If the spaceship was still producing and expelling trash, as the scene involving the ship-based Wall-Es demonstrated, where was new material coming from?

4. The movie completely discounts human aesthetics. Quite frankly, humans will not all become fat blobs because we like looking at thin, fit people. No amount of IM chatting is going to kill our sex drive and make us decide that thin is out. Further, humans simply value the beauty of trees and nature too much to simply let the whole Earth become a desert. Even our cities have parks and the like in them.

5. As the author and biologist note, it takes much more than trash to actually prevent life from growing. We have found life near volcanic heat-vents on the bottom of the ocean, after all. There would have had to be some kind of poisoning equivalent to dousing the entire Earth in Clorox or something, and that is way too far-fetched to be believed.

6. And speaking of which, what about the oceans? We killed every speck of algae in there as well? Are you kidding me?

7. Wall-E seems oddly disconnected from the fact that apparently thousands of his bretheren have died around him. In fact, he thinks nothing of cannabalizing their parts. That does not jibe with his later attachment to Eve.

8. Ah yes, Eve. First off, if everyone knows that Earth is devoid of life and full of trash, then why exactly is she blowing up everything that moves? What possible danger exists on Earth? Why even give her a weapon? She's no different in purpose than the Mars Rover, and I'm pretty sure we didn't outfit that little thing with any kind of defense mechanism. And if she's looking for life, why doesn't the cockroach count? If you find animal life, then there's likely to be other forms of life around as well, don't you think? Isn't the cockroach enough of a sign?

9. Even better, if the spaceship's main computer has already decided that humans should never go back to Earth, then why waste time and energy sending Eve to look for life on Earth in the first place? It would have ended the program immediately.

10. When Wall-E first encounters Eve, she nearly blows him up on several occasions (again, shouldn't she have known that the only things for her to encounter on Earth would be other robots?), yet he still tries to befriend her. I don't know about you, but I don't introduce myself to someone who starts shooting at me before I have even waved hello. Those are seriously disturbed folks.

11. For some reason, the videoscreens on Earth are still functioning intermittantly. It's apparently been over a hundred years since humans left Earth, and yet electronics that have been left to the elements (including incredible dust-storms that scare the crap out of a robot) without any kind of upkeep are still working? Yeah, right.

12. What the hell is the cockroach eating?

I could go on. Really, this movie was a complete mess. I wanted to love it, but too many things just hit the wrong note with me.

Dude, it's a Disney movie for children.

Dude, did you look around at who was in the movie theatres? Hannah Montana is meant for children. Wall-E was meant for children and adults alike.

Yeah, if you're gonna pick on one aspect, why stop there?

Regarding resources in space, I've been reading a lot of Vernor Vinge lately. He goes into the subject a lot. Basically a spacefaring society is not sustainable without planetary civilization to support it, and he explores a lot of the ramifications of that thesis.

Things don't immediately freeze when exposed to space, there isn't any air, so the only way to lose heat is by slowly radiating it. A bigger danger would be direct sunlight frying the plant in space.

The plant wouldn't have flash frozen. Flash freezing means that most of the heat energy of the object is transmitted to the surrounding environment. This depends on having a lot of colder particles surrounding the object, so that there can be very many interactions that leave the particles of the object at a reduced energy state. But there aren't any colder particles in a vacuum. Space is a good insulator; whatever heat you have, you keep, because there's nowhere for it to go.

Instead, its surface water would have boiled:

"At NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now renamed Johnson Space Center) we had a test subject accidentally exposed to a near vacuum (less than 1 psi) in an incident involving a leaking space suit in a vacuum chamber back in '65. He remained concious for about 14 seconds, which is about the time it takes for O2 deprived blood to go from the lungs to the brain. The suit probably did not reach a hard vacuum, and we began repressurizing the chamber within 15 seconds. The subject regained conciousness at around 15,000 feet equivalent altitude. The subject later reported that he could feel and hear the air leaking out, and his last conscious memory was of the water on his tongue beginning to boil."

To answer your other questions:

1. When we first see the spaceship, I think we see debris and junk in orbit near it. Presumably the waste from the spaceship is being ejected into space.

2. Because the robots on the spaceship are indoor robots, not earth class robots. (That's what the -E on Wall-E means.) Wall-E seems quite a bit smarter than the ship-bound robots; perhaps increased intelligence is necessary to deal with the unpredictable Earth environment. Also, maybe there were larger robots in the Earth clean-up effort, but they broke down sooner because they require more power.

3. Robot operated mining camps on Mars.

4. If there aren't any thin people, we'll fuck fat people. We'll fuck a toaster if we have to. (It will have to be very brave.) And our cities only have trees because there are any trees. If there weren't any, we wouldn't have any, right? Also, if the autopilot or the news system has total control of all information dissemination to the passengers, how would they know that thin people or trees ever existed? Remember, Old-Earth newsreels were a revelation to the captain.

5. At the beginning we see that the Earth has a brown atmosphere. I think we're meant to believe that atmospheric poisoning has indeed occurred.

6. Take all the oxygen out and everything dies. See: Gulf of Mexico dead zone.

7. How do you know what he thinks? Maybe the first time he had to cannibalize another Wall-E unit, he was heartbroken about it. Maybe it took him a hundred years to work up the nerve. Maybe he's inured to it through simple repetition. Or maybe he only developed emotions last week. Also, he's a robot.

8. Because they left a lot of really smart, heavily armed autonomous robots behind on Earth, and robots are known to go crazy (hence the sanitarium on the ship). Also, how do you know Eve robots weren't previously used to put down the rebellion among the Venusian swamp monsters?

9. Because each individual robot or computer subassembly is individually sentient, or at least has its own personality and opinions. What you call the "main computer" is the autopilot, a powerful but not necessarily all-powerful entity aboard ship. Or even if the autopilot is all-powerful (except for the off switch), it may be following a cargo cult version of the instructions left by the founders, which may have included sending out the Eve robots - the auto-pilot might not even know what they're for.

10. Perhaps Wall-E, being himself a robot who has transcended and altered his programming, understood that Eve would eventually be capable of doing the same--but in the meantime would follow her directives. Perhaps his decision to undertake significant risk in order to allow her personality to flower could be seen as heroic. Also, have you ever been to a singles bar? If cute girls had lasers in their heads, this is exactly what it would be like.

11. How do you know that maintenance robots weren't replacing the defective display panels right up until last week? For that matter, why do you assume any of this stuff is electronic? Maybe those display panels are some advanced form of e-ink, or some further technology we haven't invented yet.

12. Wall-E feeds the cockroach. That's why it's still alive. We even see him doing it. That's also why abandoning the cockroach to take the rocket ride was such a big deal.

Did you even watch the movie? :-)

"Yes, in episode 7B when Itchy plays the xylophone, a certain sound is heard. Later, when he does it again, a completely different sound emerges. What are we to believe that that was a magic xylophone that produced two different sounds? I really hope somebody got fired for that one."

"I'll take this one. Why would a man wearing a shirt that says, Genius At Work sit around watching a children's TV show?"

" I, uh, withdraw the question."

(Paraphrased from The Simpsons).

Last night's "Itchy & Scratchy" was, without a doubt, the worst
episode ever. Rest assured that I was on the Internet within
minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world.