Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge
The Verge is a place where you can consider the future. So are movies. In Yesterday’s Future, we revisit a movie about the future and consider the things it tells us about today, tomorrow, and yesterday.
The movie: Wall-E (2008)
The future: In Wall-E, waste is what does us in. The first third of Pixar’s ninth film is among the best 30-minute stretches of cinema the studio has ever produced: a mostly silent experience where Wall-E, a cute trash-compacting robot, introduces us to an abandoned Earth. As Wall-E wanders a derelict city, collecting trinkets of humanity we left behind, we slowly learn what went wrong. The excesses of humanity have led to too much garbage. Landfills quickly became inadequate, and for every skyscraper in the…