There's a difference between being able to replace parts and being able to completely repair a whole robot
"doctors know how to heal people so why aren't they resurrecting all the dead people in the entire world"
...I just realized but how do we know that WALL-E was the only robot left alive? Like they only showed like one huge city not the entire world
Also, Wall-E knew how to repair himself but wasn't it a stupid decision to program the robots to not also know how to recycle other robots to remake a new robot?
I mean wall-e's design isn't really the best for in depth repair work, iirc we only see him swapping out pieces, which might be the extent of what that model of robot was able to do. From how easily he was able to do the swap outs it does seem that was taken into mind when designing the robots and as a result maybe the robots did for as long as they were able to.
"Well why didn't they make it so the wall-es could handle finer repairs?" Because that's not their primary task, their primary task is cleaning up the earth, they had to design with that in mind first before thinking of anything to do with repairs. Honestly the best possible solution would have been to potentially design a partner robot who could handle finer repairs, but the humans were also focusing on leaving earth as a whole, they probably didn't have the time to design an additional robot that would get left behind anyways.
Okay this is so important to me because Wall-E’s plot revolves around the fact that our Wall-E is different for the fact he fixed himself and collected trinkets. In the film they state the original plan to clean up the Earth was meant to take 5 years at which time there were still B&L corporate executives on the planet at least who were directing the operation and would’ve assumably been there to direct the robots, replacing any that break down.
This obviously doesn’t work out and as we see in the A113 directive clip, that the burning of all the trash has released unmanageable amounts of toxic gases which is why they abandon the planet and why the President of B&L is wearing a gas mask as he leaves.
At this point they’ve given up because they’ve decided it’s easier to just remain in space; leaving behind all the wall.e robots. Except they keep going, because they don’t know the mission is over, they just keep stacking trash into cubes waiting for it to be incinerated.
Over time the toxic environment and the storm breaks everything down including the Wall.E drones which are still just simple Ai’s with one ‘directive’ like all the robots in the film are before they meet our Wall.E. Our one is the one to break the mould because he starts collecting stuff and discovering human culture after living so long. This includes him listening to music, watching old movies and even small things from these movies like self care of hanging your shoes up at the end of every day.
Of rows and rows of Wall.E’s our one is the last one because he started to act human; possibly long after all the others had broken down. He may not even recognise what they are properly in the same way he doesn’t recognise why he goes out and stacks garbage every day.
What’s important is that his original chip is still intact which allows him to learn and grow into a person which is why he briefly forgets everything and becomes emotionless near the end of the film when the chip is broken and replaced. He can’t fix the other Wall.E’s because he was never programmed how to, that was most likely the job of another robot that has long since broken down, possibly his very own home, which was clearly built to house Wall.E’s long term.
What he can do however is influence the other robots around him he finds with his learned humanity that he uses to take care of himself. Like EVE or MOE or even all the broken robots in the repair bay. It’s because of this at the end of the movie that they’re then able to save him.
TLDR: Wall-E doesn’t fix the other Wall-E’s because he was never meant to and probably doesn’t recognise that he even can. Wall-E survives because he learns to be human and take care of himself which he then teaches to the other robots.
