'Elio' is decidedly mid-level Pixar
Also, 'How to Train Your Dragon' is an unnecessary, poorly shot remake
The conventional wisdom, from many people is, “the old Pixar movies were great, and the new ones are bad,” or maybe that the demarcation line was when Disney bought the company in 2006.
But that’s not quite true; there were mediocre Pixar movies in the early days and great ones more recently. I have a great deal of love for both Onward and Soul, while Turning Red and Elemental are both above average. I won’t defend Lightyear, and while I remember liking Inside Out 2, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about what its plot was.
The latest Pixar film is Elio, a film in which the main problem is not the worst one to have: There are just too many ideas, and too many things going on. The film is fine — about in the middle of the pack, Pixar-wise – but I would have liked it more if its plot had been more streamlined.
The film tells the story of Elio Solis, an 11-year-old boy whose parents have recently died. Living with his aunt (voiced by Zoe Saldana), who works on a military base that monitors space debris. Elio is trying to escape the grief by nurturing an obsession with space and aliens, including lying down on a beach and asking the aliens to abduct him.
Elio soon gets his wish, where he’s brought about a spaceship, introduced to a sort of Space UN called the Communiverse, and befriends a tiny alien slug.
The best part of the film, by far, is Elio’s arrival on the spaceship, which is beautifully rendered, and introduces us to a world with gorgeous colors and lots of unique creatures.
Elio includes some voiceover by the late Carl Sagan, and plays around with some Sagan-like ideas about exploring the cosmos. It has nails that moment, super-important in any movie about contact with the aliens, in which it’s about to happen, and we know the possibilities are virtually limitness of what we’re about to see.
The problem is, the movie is a lot less interesting when it’s anywhere but the ship. And it’s plot ends up way too busy.
Elio is adjusting to life in space, and playing along with the misunderstanding that he’s the leader of Earth, and helping his alien friend, and trying to bond with his aunt, and trying to grieve and come to terms with his parents’ death.
There’s also a subplot that borrows a page from Twin Peaks: The Return, and sends a clone down to replace Elio on Earth.
There’s also a character named Melmac, who I assume was named as a homage to the home planet of the alien on the old sitcom ALF (either that, or both names have some older sci-fi etymology than that.)
A lot of recent Disney movies have started as Disney+ premieres and been retrofitted into feature films; Elio has so much going on that it might have been better off as a six- or eight-part series.
Between the 2025 film being called Elio, and the one four years earlier being called Luca, why do I get the sense someone at Pixar is a huge fan of Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name? Not that Pixar would ever make a movie with that plot, nor with the involvement with Armie Hammer.
Offering much less originality was the new How to Train Your Dragon film, a virtual shot-for-shot live action remake of the animated movie, which kicked off a franchise in 2010.
The film came out last week and was a box-office smash — wasn’t Snow White supposed to be the permanent death of those, just a couple of months ago? So I expect we’re probably going to end up getting more of these, including remakes of the animated sequels. But the new film is not very creatively successful at all, and I say that as someone who really liked the cartoons.
Written and directed by Dean DeBlois, who directed the animated films as well. The plot is the same: There’s a viking village where the humans the dragons have forever been at war, and young Hiccup, who’s being trained by his father to be a warrior, instead befriends a dragon named Toothless.
The biggest problem is that the action is shot somewhat incoherently, with way too much shaky cam and extreme closeups. The finale, in particular, is a mess.
The combination of live-action humans and CGI dragons can only recall Game of Thrones, and How to Train Your Dragon reminded me of some of those later GoT battle episodes where you could never tell what the hell was going on.