Elio (2025)

*/****
screenplay by Julia Cho & Mark Hammer & Mike Jones
directed by Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw Elio, from Coco co-director Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian (animator, Turning Red), and Domee Shi (director, Turning Red), is a derivative oddball-kid/buddy comedy space adventure of the middle-aspiring family-programmer variety Pixar now uses to pad its roster between increasingly flaccid and uninspired franchise tentpoles. How the mighty have fallen. Boasting three directors and three writers (Julia Cho (Turning Red), Mark Hammer (Shotgun Wedding), and Mike Jones (Soul and Luca)), it’s a mosaic of borrowed bits designed to geek chafed pleasure centres, thus ensuring the relative placidity of your children for a couple of hours. That is, if the shot-for-shot “live-action” remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon have run their course…which they haven’t. Maybe the inevitably tepid word-of-mouth damning praise–the “you know, for kids!” and “the whole family will like it” kind, or even the classic “it’s not great, but I cried”–will help it reach whatever goals it’s meant to before assuming its proper place as anonymous streaming filler for a content-voracious delivery service. It’s the sort of movie Common Sense Media and other censorious sites for terrible parents adore, if that gives you an idea. It’s funny because it’s not like I even dislike Elio; it’s just that if you ask me to think about it, I start to realize how much of my life I’ve wasted.

Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is, in the Disney fashion, an orphan being raised by his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña). He doesn’t feel like he belongs on Earth, and so, after stumbling into an exhibition featuring the Voyager spacecraft, he embarks on a quest involving ham radios and bulb lights to entice aliens into abducting him. (Confirmed later in the film: he wants to be probed.) His bullies don’t believe he belongs on Earth, either, and beat him badly enough one night that he has to wear a disconcerting adhesive patch over one eye. If you’re wondering what kind of injury requires that kind of repair, join the club: Elio is a nice movie, remember? Soon enough, Elio gets abducted by a commune of intergalactic space socialists who would like to admit either Elio or warlord Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) into its ranks of peace-loving hippies high enough on their own supply that they mistake Elio for the leader of a planet because he tells them he is. Elio, badly outmatched by the genocidal tyrant, decides to take the tyrant’s son, Glordon (Remy Edgerly), hostage. Leave this “Communiverse” forever, or Elio will harm Glordon. It’s okay, though, because Glordon is in on it. Or is it okay even though Glordon is in on it? Turns out Glordon needs some attention from his cold, sociopathic, authoritarian father, and Elio considers himself a burden to young Olga, who has a dog-eared book about raising “special” kids that doesn’t appear to be helping. Theirs is a friendship, Glordon and Elio’s, based on deep-rooted feelings of parental abandonment–Elio’s exacerbated, of course, by his dead parents, Glordon’s by an absent mother. Heartwarming!

If you’re keeping track, Elio by its midway point has ripped off Explorers, Galaxy Quest, The Last Starfighter (egregiously), and The Good Dinosaur (though seeing as how Molina was a writer on The Good Dinosaur, is it still ripping it off?), not to mention weird-ass shit like Hair and, oops, Friday the 13^th Part III. By the time it’s through, it will also poach the last, dying thumbs up from Terminator 2, plus aspects of Galaxy Quest, “The Simpsons”, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Halo, Battle Beyond the Stars, and, well, Lilo & Stitch, too, in the Olga/Elio relationship (and eventually Glordon, right)? Despite a Talking Heads needle-drop and a few chest-arresting Carl Sagan clips–two popular icons of neurodivergence–what’s missing is a real reckoning with Elio’s difference and difficulty fitting in. Once in space, it’s a given that his peculiarities will serve him, but what are his peculiarities beyond wearing a cape all the time and wanting to get molested by little green men? He isn’t demonstrably focused, hyper or otherwise, on learning things about his area of obsession, doesn’t have unique technical know-how or natural ability. Is his specialness that he’s so profoundly traumatized by the loss of his parents that he’s essentially suicidal? (See: K-Pax, Martian Child.) Elio is completely unremarkable, in other words, making his inevitable redemption one of coming to terms with loss. Is that what Glordon comes to terms with as well? It doesn’t seem like it in his tear-jerking moment of connection with his dad (see: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs).

So, what is this movie about? Why is Elio a hero? Is it just because he has a serious, and scary, undiagnosed depression? (Shades of Inside Out.) What does it say about a grief important enough to murder a child’s parents? What does it say about fathers and sons that requires one to be held under threat of death so the other will demonstrate fear and affection? What, ultimately, does it provide children–who will experience unimaginable loss in their lifetime, should they live long enough–in terms of armour and guidance? Elio doesn’t belong in the Communiverse–in fact, he lies repeatedly and consistently to maintain the illusion he is someone he isn’t. Is the message, then, that one ought to fake it till one makes it? Or that, in lieu of a “leader of the Earth,” an adequate substitution is a weird kid with a sad past who makes friends with another sad kid whose hyper-masculine dad is disappointed in him? The power of friendship? Not exactly, in that Elio and Glordon’s friendship seems secondary to the film’s solution. Who the fuck knows what Elio‘s on about.

I do want to point out the moment where Olga carefully works her tongue around her mouth and produces a curly hair that she picks off in a way that will be familiar to every single audience member who isn’t a virgin. Surely… It’s not not a blowjob, but that’s gotta be an accident, right? Some kind of animator’s “Jessica Rabbit is topless in this frame” inside joke? Anyway, Elio is the anti-exceptionalism film–the anti-The Incredibles, in which people with no distinguishing qualities are not only celebrated but rewarded for…for…for allowing others to love and protect them? Elio is either radical on purpose in its rejection of every quality we value as a culture, or it’s just that way accidentally: the first mainstream kids’ movie about the successful acquisition of attention and love through allegorical suicide attempts. But why does Elio have to be about something, Walter? And, you know, you’re absolutely right. It’s just for kids, after all. Let them figure it out.