The movie was pretty good – in some ways it was better than the first.  They managed to keep 3 to 4 plotlines running concurrently and bring them all together nicely in the end.  The first had a pretty linear story arc – animals escape the zoo, get sent away, crash land in Madagascar and try to find balance and unity against adversity.  In part 2, they not only move the story forward, but they reach back into the past as well.  There is an arc involving Alex the Lion’s return to his parents and reconcile this relationship.  There is an arc involving Gloria figuring out what is important in a relationship.  There is an arc with the penguins and the monkeys working on solving their transit options.  And there is even an arc involving the humans affected by the actions of the animals at hand.

There was plenty of humor and action for all ages to enjoy – including the adults who will have to take their kids to see it.  And the new voice talent was aptly chosen (Alex Baldwin should definitely do more voice acting).  But they seemed to gloss over an issue that seemed central to the prequel – food.  The group of zoo animals find themselves in a wildlife preserve with many others of each of their kind, but there doesn’t seem to be any fear of the lions by the herbivores on this preserve.  Since this issue was such a hot one with Alex when they were stuck on the island before, it is hard to ignore the fact that it was ignored in this movie all together.

In all, the positive outways the negative.  All the favorites were back and in character.  Bernie Mac played well in one of his last roles and Alex Baldwin was great as the antagonist.  While I appreciate Sasha Baron Cohen’s humor, his part felt a bit annoying this time around.  But he played an important part in the plot, so I will forgive it.  If you have kids, take them to see it.  If you don’t, you can still go see it if you want, but I’d either go with a late show or just wait for the DVD.

The setting of the movie is Earth some 800 years in the future.  And what we find is a landscape riddled with garbage.  And it would seem that the failure of society to avoid such a fate is directly tied to the success of american consumerism.  And what is truly scary about this nihilistic outlook is that it may not be much of an exaggeration.

While our behavior as Americans is not necessarily a precise mirror of the rest of the world, areas with small ecological footprints are in the minority among most cultures.  As a result of recent rhetoric (and unfortunately moreso due to movies like this one), the idea of living cleaner and greener is becoming more mainstream, but it will take more than a couple years of bashing the world over the head with the club of awareness to turn around millennia of unbridled growth and consumption.  We are like a caterpillar chowing down on leaves and only now realizing we may run out of leaves.  While we can try to manage our appetite to an extent, we are bound to grow or die and we can’t exactly switch trees.  In Wall-E, we found a way to build a cocoon – in many ways, I don’t think we are there yet.

One idea that I’ve long held that this movie affirmed was that whatever happens to us as a species – whether we recover and find balance or continue to consume and ravage the Earth until we collapse – the Earth will live on in spite of us.  This world we live in came to be through billions of years of coalescence and millions of years of evolution under more volatile circumstances than we observe today.  We could manage to wipe the slate clean through a nuclear holocaust or some other machination of destruction not yet imagined and it will simply mean a new chapter in a much longer story.  I’d like to think that we can find a way to continue beyond the chapter we are in.  I guess only time will tell.  If some of us can imagine a version of our future where in a world ravaged by our carelessness can result in an unlikely romance between a pair of robots that manage to wake up humanity by overzealously trying to do their jobs, then made there is hope.