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ELIO

2025

Directed by Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina

Written by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer, Mike Jones, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina

Spoilers: moderate, though also borderline inapplicable

Elio's road into and out of theaters has generated more interest than the film itself did, and I can't tell you that's unfair: it's pretty bad, even before considering how the story around it reflects our contemporary quagmire.  It began as a personal (even quasi-autobiographical, though I don't believe he was ever abducted by aliens) project for Adrian Molina, a storyperson who's been banging around Pixar these past twenty years, whose biggest claim to fame prior to—what was intended to be—his solo directorial debut was being the Latin co-director that Pixar could point to whenever anyone asked uncomfortable questions about the cultural authenticity of Lee Unkrich's Coco, though in fairness he does also have co-writing credits on that film.  (I've always preferred The Book of Life myself.)  Now, Molina retains a directorial credit here, though it's shared with Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi, and it's known that it's at least partly honorary, for the well-publicized reason that creative differences between Molina and Pixar, or rather the Disney corporation that owns them both, reached the point where Molina walked away from, again, his own quasi-autobiographical personal project.  Subsequent notes chipped away at what remained of Molina's concept, most infamously a sufficient amount of G-rated queer coding for the titular character to have rendered it more-or-less unambiguous (Molina is gay, after all), and the general attitude amongst those dissenting from Disney's treatment of Elio is that in this and other things they genericized it so hard that what Sharafian and Shi delivered wasn't really much of a movie anymore.  Now, I don't think, at this point, that we can be sure that's why it isn't one.  For starters, you could get the impression that the queer element was so salient that it impacted the plot, and I did watch it wondering where it was even supposed to go; it turns out, mainly anodyne and modular-sounding scenes indicating "an interest in fashion" and such (it was not, not that I contemplated this too seriously, "a boy and his childhood sweetheart, a space worm"), and it fucking sucks that even this could've gotten sanded down, but I honestly can't believe that, even without this interference, we'd have had a good movie.  The best-case scenario sounds like, well, Luca, an unmistakable milestone on Pixar's decade-long downward slide, gentler than that of their corporate cousins at Walt Disney Animation Studios, but winding up in the same place.

Anyway, subjective "quality" is only my problem.  Disney's problem—though unfortunately this is our problem, too—is that after all this, Elio was released in June and flat-out bombed, grossing just a hair above the lowest estimate of its production budget, with $154 million in box office receipts.  Everyone is kind of mad about this, though the maddest I've seen people get is angrily asking "how dare you blame us?", when a Disney PR statement suggested that if audiences weren't going to see original cartoons then they were going to stop making them, which seems logical-enough to me.  But I guess it's nice—after a fashion—to know that Molina landed so squarely on his feet after his debacle: when he walked off Elio he walked right onto Coco 2.

So: Elio remains the story of Elio Solís (Yonas Kibreab), lately rendered a lonely orphan by the death of both of his parents in some offscreened-and-undisclosed tragedy.  (If you wonder whether such a thematically-loaded surname could possibly be real, it is, though its etymology tracks with "solar"—get that through your system—rather than "solitude.")  He's been commended to the care of his aunt, Maj. Olga Solís (Zoe Saldaña), who is bound to uproot him and move him onto her USAF post in probably-California.  Not ever the most socially-adept child, Elio never makes friends (indeed, he's more prone to making enemies), but he finds his calling when his aunt takes him to the Air and Space Museum and, not unlike the robots in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Elio has a life-changing experience when he's confronted with the story of Voyager 1.  Perceiving his aunt's frayed love for him as only a social obligation that she resents, his personality narrows into nothing besides his obsession with space, and particularly space aliens, eventually evolving into a prayer to the heavens that they come and take him.  (This manifests as Elio monopolizing an enormous stretch of public beach for far longer than a child should be allowed out in the Southwestern sun, which may be a contribution to his problems, as is the embarrassing message in the sand which he's devised to get the aliens' attention.)  As Olga's job involves near-Earth orbit tracking, Elio can maintain that much interest in his aunt, spying on and interfering with her work, and he's on hand when one Gunther Melmac (wow, is that ever annoying; Brendan Hunt) claims to have received an alien signal and is about to send a reply when Olga and company put the kibosh on that, mostly because they disbelieve him, although I also hope there are protocols that kick such a civilization-altering decision up to somebody higher than an O-5.  Elio, however, sends the reply back himself, and they arrive to grant Elio his wish to leave his world behind.

But the galaxy-spanning "Communiverse" to which Elio has been invited has, for the reasons I just indicated, gotten it into their own heads that Elio must be one of Earth's leaders, and he goes along with their mistake.  Unfortunately, what might have been a farce (it'd be better as a farce) becomes life-and-death when the Communiverse, bound by pacifism, refuses admission to another prospective candidate for membership, Grigon (Brad Garrett), the leader of a warrior race of caterpillars, ambulatory and heavily-armed by dint of their enormous mech-suits; Elio, desperate to fit in somewhere, declares that he can negotiate with the space monster, and his credulous hosts agree.  Elio promptly gets himself imprisoned, but incompetently enough that he just as promptly breaks out, arriving in the chambers of the caterpillar prince, Glordon (Remy Edgerly).  Elio confesses the truth to Glordon, but the alien recognizes in Elio something of a kindred spirit, for he is also lonesome and has been made to feel like an unwanted obligation, so he agrees to go along with a ruse in which he's "held hostage" in order to solve the ongoing diplomatic crisis.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this only escalates matters, and Elio and Glordon have to scramble to save the Communiverse, eventually roping in Olga, who's been increasingly suspicious of the much-better-adjusted clone-Elio she's been looking after in the meantime (also Kibreab), because screenwriting principles dictate all plots be tied up neatly.

There's a workability here, even if you can probably tell that I think it's awkwardly-kludged.  And as it's not like these are such novel concepts, the object lessons in it not working loom large over Elio; Molina probably would've preferred us to think of it in terms of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though what he made was Nick Castle's The Last Starfighter, which is to say a movie that ensured its director would continue to be most famous for being a mute stuntman in a grindhouse film, though for all of its problems The Last Starfighter still managed to have a first act that didn't last an hour.  (It's also uncomfortably similar to Joe Dante's Explorers, and by demonstrating the ways in which Dante's movie, already balanced on a razor's edge, could've gone wrong, this does the opposite of endearing it to me.  But it truly is superficial: Elio really has no access to that film's anything—its mysterious vibe, its thematic ingenuity, and not least its superlative cast of children instead of "child.")

Either way, to the extent it does work, Elio starts itself up so late that it only leaves itself about forty minutes to have a story, or even incident, and to some degree it really only casts the illusion of working because it's a relief that the movie has stopped its continual scene-setting.  So Elio at last makes his unlikely magical friend about thirty minutes after ElioT did in a longer, less-complicated movie (it's also E.T., of course).  Likewise, once the pieces are in place, Olga twigs to the extraordinary shift in personality undergone by her charge, this being Elio's most blatant lift from The Last Starfighter but, in fairness, it was the most successful element there, too (whereas Olga's swift recognition that the "good" Elio isn't the one she loves is by far this film's cleverest beat and most keenly-felt emotional hook).  So there's real potential in Olga's comic sci-fi thriller, though Sharafian/Shi/Molina determined it was worth approximately one and a half scenes, and they conclude it with a note of effective low-key body horror that sort of sticks in the craw anyway, because now one's wondering if Elio's been wearing an eyepatch this whole time, the result of an injury inflicted by bullies, mostly just to motivate the creepy-crawly culmination of Olga's truncated investigations.

This doesn't go anywhere particularly compelling (the clone at least remains enjoyable, though he graduates from horror to the proverbial moral terror, in a way that I might admire the movie for, if it didn't seem, also, as if the implications had merely gotten away from everyone, more the manifestation of an industrial movie-making process's own inhumanity than the gleefully-nasty keep-a-kid-awake-at-night impulse that it might've been).  Before this, the movie's just been logy as shit.  It obviously can't be a hang-out film for its oddly-distended first phase: Elio has no friends and barely interacts with his aunt.  So it's just a rude and obnoxious child being weird by himself, and even that's just scene after scene of gestures at self-isolating monomania, rather than any earnest attempt to involve you in Elio's process.  (It's not like fellow orphan and nerd Ellie Arroway is a very social person, either, but besides Voyager 1, and despite dropping in soundbytes from Carl Sagan in a manner that badly overestimates how profound any of this is, I don't think a kid could manage to learn much from this, and frankly I have the inkling that it could only make them stupider.)  It's honestly remarkable that this Elio is the result of a butching-up directive, too, since he's just so twerpish; hell, making him more affirmatively effeminate would actually have helped.  (I'm also fairly certain showing some snippet of his life with his parents would have done so too: there's a device of a conlang, called "Elioese," originally spoken only by three people and now only one, which Elio uses to apparently deliberately antagonize Olga—it doesn't recommend "Elioese" that it's a dumb conlang on top of being implicitly self-aggrandizing—that undoubtedly would've been cloying even in better circumstances; but having this backstory only related to us secondhand, without anchoring it to any feelings we've ever felt for ourselves, means it can't even claw its way up to "cloying.")  Some of it may be as petty as I don't like the "fashion" that does make its way into Elio's personality.  His colander hat is dubiously functional, but that cape, that's just vanity, isn't it?

The movie gets better in space—it at least finally gives Elio a scene partner that he's doing anything with rather than bypassing—though it remains spotty and featureless and in a perpetual state of cautious optimism that fixing itself upon a larkish tone is the same thing as "adventure" or "comedy."  I don't want to commit to drawing conclusions from the generalizations I'm about to make, but historically Pixar has been pretty bad at juvenile protagonists (their first giving them their first flop, in fact, in The Good Dinosaur), and, perhaps related to their usually-adult protagonists, nearly all of Pixar's most beloved movies have been about systems, imaginative worlds to the side of our real one that we get to explore through the power of top-of-the-line animation and, typically, interesting storytelling that's peddling interesting ideas.  This has been, anyway, the studio's primary mode ever since Toy Story, and remained the basis for their two successful films of the 20s (mainly Soul, though I have a soft spot for Elemental).  Luca and Turning Red largely abandoned it—maybe not coincidentally, with Elio we have a whole weird, presumably-accidental "trilogy," involving Pixar giving first-time feature directors $150-200 million to make fantasy-inflected childhood memoirs that are shaped like, but don't really function like, adventure cartoons, which are then fiddled with by dozens of other stakeholders anyway, and I am entirely okay with drawing some conclusions from that—and we could maybe push that back even to Onward (another fantastic memoir, albeit better-disguised), which like The Good Dinosaur has "a system" in the form of its alternate universe, but evidently not one that engaged the world-building faculties of its makers, or was ever all that conceptually appealing beyond a one-sentence summary.

Elio goes in that direction, of feinting at a deep and involving new world running on its own arcane logic, though what we get is basically just sci-fi dross that isn't even terribly interested in its own parody of the United Federation of Planets as a collective of peacenik morons so incapable of defending themselves they anoint an obviously-lying Earthling loser as their savior.  (The Communiverse is even more like the Neutrals in Futurama, if you stripped the cognizable satire out.)  The caterpillar people—I'm confident they're called something, but I don't remember their name, or see it in the Wikipedia article—are just some good old-fashioned Klingons, and somehow might come off even less coherent, thanks to extrinsic factors placing some serious constraints on how these tropish space barbarians behave (so mostly just lightly-abusive parenting).  And it should be hard to be less coherent than the Communiverse: they find Elio while he's getting the shit kicked out of him by bullies, and nevertheless accept that this guy could be our leader, not even questioning the apparent coup d'etat they've just interrupted, and I don't think the movie satisfactorily explains why "Earth's ambassador," sent forth to make contact with the great galactic community, requires a changeling to replace him in his interactions with the larger, more stable-footed creature that is, very fucking obviously, his parent.  Still, I think the caterpillars must be more underbaked, given that it's revealed their spaceships run on, uh, lava (my wife asked me at this juncture if the whole movie was going to turn out to be a childish dream; it is not).  For all that, Pixar does also make buddy movies—from Woody and Buzz to Joy and Sadness, though you wouldn't even need to know what movie I'm referring to with the latter pair to know those buddies are usually mismatched—so maybe Elio and Glordon suffer from having basically the same problems and absolutely zero conflict (and probably as much from Elio being roughly ten and Glordon and Edgerly's piping voice coming off as, developmentally, about six, to the point it sort of feels like Elio's manipulating him), though the movie doesn't quite give you the opportunity to know this for sure: when one or the other of these fast friends says "you never told me that," the natural rejoinder is, "of course he didn't, you've only known each other for an hour and most of that was a time-compressing montage."

There's not a lot of content to these derivative ideas, then—almost anti-content—possibly as a strategy to keep them from distracting you from the absence of force in all the other derivative ideas, but a Pixar film could, theoretically, get away with it, by virtue of some of the world's most-accomplished animation artists indulging in whiz-bang space imagery.  It starts off on the wrongest foot: you'd think a more profitable studio note would point out how much people hate the CalArts (Molina's alma mater) "beanmouth" design mentality as fully-rendered CGI, though in Olga's case it feels downright vengeful, like "beanmouth? how about beanhead, motherfucker?"  Elemental briefly brought us back to a place where we could discuss Pixar aesthetics again without being redundant, but this is more like Inside Out 2: there's very little purpose in praising the size of the studio's computers, and the only thing I'm remotely excited about in that regard is some of the plastic textures showcased in the third act, specifically a hazmat suit and a translucent curtain, so while I mean that sincerely, I don't think this will give any normal person pleasure.

Still, with the space imagery, I think they almost get something special out of Glordon, who's really disgusting in an occasionally-fun way, though he's undercut by being harmlessly cute, and he's still practically it, besides the stray Communiverse creature like the one that's a flying anomalocaris, whereas the remainder of the caterpillar people (though this isn't actually a larval stage) are generally all confined to their much-duller-looking, crab-like mech-suits, which feels like a curious notion to me, given that it strongly insinuates that they're a species ashamed of their own morphology, an insinuation the movie itself hasn't consciously noticed.  The Communiverse gathering place (their space... ship? station?) feels like nothing but slopped-together space stuff, two-dimensional bands inter-rotating for no apparent reason (Elio's unusual take on artificial gravity is a wearable device).  The Molina touch is that it looks like the diffusion-barf backgrounds from Coco, but only offers wonderments that might appeal to extremely little kids, like a self-replicating treats buffet, while one of the better jokes in the movie entails Elio's introduction to a grandiose system of waterfalls that his Communiversal guide, taking a slightly condescending tone, explains is actually the toilet.  For some reason, this amusing womp-womp gag cuts to Elio jumping into the water, and the sensation is that of the screenplay and story artists decoupling completely, and one wonders momentarily if maybe there really is something to the notion that Molina's movie was hollowed out and left to die.  Yet it's so devoted to empty assertions of emotion, risibly childish sci-fi, and an even stupider "rousing" space mission finale, that there's simply not any preexisting "good" movie in evidence in the carcass left behind.

Score: 4/10