REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth.

There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio, turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true.

The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space?

But miracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador of Uh-Earth. Elio will do anything to certify his place here. And so, when it becomes clear that the only thing he can do is stop the war-mongering alien lord, Grigon, from launching an attack, he goes up to bat. This he does hoping to stop an intergalactic war: he wasn't counting on finding his first real friend.

The alien world is a fluid, vibrant, crystalline paradise. The filmmaking itself pays some delightful homage to the likes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Alien, but the designs of the actual extraterrestrials derive from no obvious earthly source. There's a bit of sea-slug, a bit of toothy caterpillar, a bit of artisan walnut sculpture, etc. these all seem to have sprung directly from the minds of this movie and this team. This gives the audience the chance to imagine that they really are the first to discover this corner of the universe.

It's sometimes said that good voice acting does not draw attention to the talent behind the mic: I don't know if that's always true. I'll tip a hat at the young newcomers, Yonas Kibreab and Remy Edgerly, but I was also absolutely beside myself recognizing such talent as Jameela Jamil, Brad Garret, and Brendan Hunt. There's something really nice about realizing that even established artists will absolutely not take for granted the opportunity to be visually reincarnated as a Pixar space-fuzzy.

Still, I'll give the golden medal to Zoe Saldaña as Olga, Elio's aunt. Her character is disadvantaged by not being as colorful as Elio's alien cohorts, but Saldaña brings such delicacy and personality to the position that she wrestles the spotlight from more visually stimulating puppets--no small feat for a character who herself has a hard time articulating emotions. This is "Wizard of Oz" where Auntie Em stands toe-to-toe with the lion and the scarecrow.

If there's one note to be made ... the film's opening is admittedly a little overstuffed. The movie puts us through a few drills before flinging us to the far reaches of the galaxy, and you start to wonder if this is how the whole movie is going to be.

Good news: it isn't. A little less than halfway through, you can recognize the rhythm the movie sets during that cold opening, and the film spends the rest of the time building variations and progressions on the theme carved out early on. Once the instruments are all set, the orchestra really comes together.

Movies like Elio these days are a bitter-sweet pill. When a movie like this overcomes the odds (this project saw a massive creative overhaul during production--watch the first teaser from 2023 and then watch the more recent trailer from this spring) and sticks the landing, its ultimate fate is still only to be shunted to second-tier priority next to projects that already come with their hooks pre-sunk into the cultural consciousness.

And it is clear by now that this sort of clout always derives from the franchise, not artist or even the studio. (Imagine supplying such master works as Monsters Inc. or Ratatouille and that still not being enough to earn the trust of theater patrons ...)

I must confess I haven't actually seen the new How to Train Your Dragon remake yet. People tell me it's better than I think it will be, whatever that's worth. I'm genuinely not in a position to tell at this time. But it's the equation as a whole that poses the problem.

"Not as bad as we thought" will always carry a lot further for a movie like the "Dragon" remake than it ever will for a movie like Elio. Critics need to be twice as aggressive to sway a fraction of viewers to see untested material like this.

And what critic is going to be crazy enough to sign their name to a cartoon?

It's easy for a fellow like me to gripe about the state of the union, as many in the film world have. But even I can forget that the film world has also always been full of surprises, and it has always turned on the most peculiar of points. Anyway, the story of Elio is the story of one kid being so convinced that he is so idiosyncratic and alone that he imagines he has to be extracted from his space to find someone who wants him, only to realize that his network of love literally stretches across the stars.

In that spirit, maybe we can keep our eyes open too.

--The Professor

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