Spaced
‘Elio’ is surprisingly solid given the fact it was never given a chance to succeed.
Elio
Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina • Writers: Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, Mike Jones
Starring [English]: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldaña, Remy Edgerly, Brad Garrett
USA • 1hr 38mins
Opens Hong Kong July 10 • I
Grade: B
Pixar’s Elio has been out for a few weeks in other parts of the world, so by now you may have heard about what a shitshow the film’s production was, and how that’s manifested in a garbage movie, worse than Elemental and possibly Pixar’s worst film ever (which is actually Cars 2) blah, blah, blah. Well, sorry to disappoint for anyone who feels like piling on but it is none of those things – and I say this as someone who generally loves to pile on – especially on Disney. Yes, there’s clearly something essential missing from Elio’s first half, the half that films like Up and Wall-E and the criminally underseen Turning Red use to define who the characters are and give all the action of the second half meaning. It feels tampered with and half-baked. It feels like someone in a boardroom lost whatever backbone they had and stripped Elio (voiced by veteran kid TV actor Yonas Kibreab) of a personality, rumoured initially to lean queer. And judging from the visual language in the rest of the film, the adventures Elio gets into and the fundamental message of living authentically and finding a way to navigate a world that doesn’t make it easy to do so well… he might have been (original director Adrian Molina is out gay).
With all the queer edges sanded off Elio – and off Elio – what’s left is a generic, painfully familiar story about a little boy who feels like he doesn’t fit in finally finding his tribe and finding value in his individuality. There’s nothing wrong with that, and Elio is a much more entertaining and resonant space adventure than you’ve probably been led to believe. If the girl in the row ahead of me bursting into tears at the third act tragedy (that we know is no big) is any indication, Elio works just fine. It’s just that it was a rare original story that could have been so much more.
Sometime after being orphaned, 10-ish Elio Solís lives with his auntie Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an air force officer specialising in satellite communications and signals intelligence or something, and one night while hanging out at work with her, he wanders into a decommissioned exhibit about Voyager 1 (the NASA space probe currently 25 billion kilometres from here). He watches the show and instantly becomes obsessed with life elsehwere in the universe and sits on the beach in his tin foil hat every night hoping to be abducted. He’s bullied by his summer camp “pals” Bryce (Dylan Gilmer) and Caleb (Jake Getman) and he’s convinced Olga resents him for making her give up her ambitions to become an astronaut, so when Elio overhears Olga’s paranoid co-worker Gunther Melmac (Brendan Hunt) talk about a message from aliens, he sneaks into the lab and responds. When the inevitable abduction happens, he welcomes it.
Elio is embraced by the Communiverse, a collective of alien civilisations sharing the best of their worlds with each other, as the leader of “Um Earth” and made ambassador. Before you know it he’s negotiating a peace treaty with the bloviating warmonger Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett). This diplomacy brings him into contact with Glordon (Remy Edgerly), Grigon’s son and heir who looks like he should be powering the spore drive in Star Trek: Discovery. The pair accept each other at face value, Glordon confiding he has no idea how to tell his father he doesn’t want to be a war machine, Elio confessing his loneliness. Glordon becomes Elio’s first real friend.
As one of the deeper meditations on otherness, disconnection and grief that Pixar has done such a commendable job of relating to kids while, never talking down to them, in the past Elio falls short, but only because Elio isn’t given a clear identity to latch on to. When he finds a place in the Communiverse, the coding in the fluidity of the space, the colour, the value placed on creativity and knowledge is lost. It becomes just another personal trial or tribulation to overcome. It’s not wrong – that little girl in row F certainly got up in her feels – it’s just shamefully un-specific and ultimately it hurts the film.
In fairness it hurts the film because we know what it might have been. As a standard space adventure about an awkward, isolated pre-teen finding his footing in a world that’s changing around him Elio is just fine. Credit to Turning Red director Domee Shi and story artist Madeline Sharafian (her short Burrow played before Soul) for massaging some kind of joy from the shell that Molina was compelled to leave behind. That Elio works on any level is purely down to their storytelling instincts, plenty of witty sci-fi nods and genuine humour; Elio’s Terminator-style melting is simultaneously creepy and hilarious. If Melmac isn’t a shout-out to the endearingly cheeseball sitcom ALF I’d be very surprised, science populariser Carl Sagan is referenced more than once, and Star Trek: Voyager Captain Janeway, Kate Mulgrew (the best Starfleet captain – fight me!) narrates the film that kick-starts Elio’s interest in space. There’s even some love for supremely nerdy ham radio enthusiasts. Shareholders are going to freak out and run back to Sequeltown (Toy Story 5, coming up) at Elio’s “failure” when it didn’t even get a fighting chance.