Elio (2025) Review

https://youtu.be/ETVi5_cnnaE?is=EGy5aiPj-WTFKk6B

“Okay, bye. Love you”

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM.

READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

It always takes time to find where you belong. You don’t think so? Think of Elio.


PLOT


The 2025 film follows the titular young boy who just lost his parents of a tragic car accident, resulting in his aunt Olga to give up astronaut aspirations to take care of him. Around this time does he become fascinated with space upon seeing an exhibit of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Believing there is life outside earth, he dreams of taken by aliens and actually waits by the beach daily. One night does he meet another kid named Bryce (Dylan Gilmer) hoping to start a radio club, but a bully named Caleb (Jake Getman) messes with his ham radio and a fight leads to his left eye getting injured. When Olga picks him up and leaves him at his workplace at an Air Force base, it only leads to him overhearing conspiracy theorist Gunther Melmac (Brendan Hunt) believe there is an extraterrestrial response to Voyager. Although Olga dismisses this, her nephew takes it serious and sends a message hoping to be retrieved, but it causes a power outage. Feeling no other choice, she sends him to a youth camp that he ends up hating due to Caleb being there. When he and more bullies try picking on him, his dream comes true and gets taken away by an alien ship. As that happens does Olga’s base get a message to what her nephew left. In the spaceship does Elio meet the supercomputer Ooooo (Shirley Henderson) that introduces him to Communiverse organization where beings of other worlds share each other’s knowledge. The Communiverse’s ambassadors include: Questa of Gom (Jameela Jamil), Helix of Falluvinum (Brandon Moon) and Tegmen of Tegmen (Matthias Schweighöfer). Due to the message, they all mistake him to be an actual ambassador of his planet. Before he can clarify, he sees warlord Lord Grigon of Hylurg who declares taking over by force after being rejected by Communiverse. Not wanting to wait any longer for acceptance, Elio volunteers negotiating with him in return for induction. Needing to keep the ruse at home, Ooooo sends a clone for his place and the latter goes home with Olga after hearing of his fight with the bullies. Negotiation immediately fails when he unintentionally upsets Grigon that he is sent to imprisonment. He is able to escape however when taking his son Glordon as a bargaining chip to leave Communiverse alone. When waiting to be picked up, they confide in each other in not being understood by their elders that Elio tries to help Glordon stay by swapping him with a clone. The warmonger picks up on this ruse and compels Questa to get his son’s location through Elio’s mind via telepathy. She gives him his location, while also discovering Elio is not a leader to his race. As Grigon wreaks havoc towards the Communiverse as a result for not finding his son immediately, Questa sends Elio back home for his protection. At the same beach where he was picked up does Elio reunite with Olga, who figured out his clone’s secret. When they reconcile, they discover Glordon accidentally activated a shuttle that sent him to earth. Surrounded by the military, Other Elio gives a distraction for the protagonist to reach his friend before decomposing. With Glordon not having a disc to regulate his body temperature, he’s too cold to stay on Earth and starts suffering of hypothermia. This leads to Elio & Olga racing back to the Communiverse. With the assist of Melmac, Bryce and other ham radio enthusiasts, they’re able to get through a debris field. Reaching Communiverse via hyperspeed, Grigon breaks apart from his carapace warsuit to save him via swaddling. When his son recovers, he apologizes to the ambassadors and frees them, while also respecting his son’s wish to not be a warrior. The ambassadors show gratitude for Elio’s sacrifices that they officially accept him to stay with them, but he surprisingly ends up deciding to stay with his aunt. As he returns to earth to with her and says goodbye to his new peers does the film end with narration by the late Carl Sagan: “It’s an ancient human theme you can find it in virtually every culture. In, uh, religion, folklore, superstition, and now in science. The search for life elsewhere is remarkable in our age because this is the first time that we can actually do something besides speculation. We can send spacecraft to nearby planets. We can use large radio telescopes to see if there is any message being sent to us lately. And it touches to the deepest of human concerns. Are we alone?”


THOUGHTS


30 years have passed since Pixar blew up with Toy Story, so you know expectations will always be high the older that movie gets. Needless to say, this one is able to meet the criteria we’re used to from the animated studio. When it comes to sci fi, you know the animation has to be gorgeous with all the colors that ensue onscreen. That best applies everytime we get to see the Communiverse each frame of that community leaves me awestruck, especially when it came to the various designs of all different kinds of aliens that build said community. You can either feel amazed when seeing the Universal Users Manual (Bob Peterson) be so visual of a presence or fall into the adorability the Hylurgians are hiding, you can’t help but admit every alien is well made much like the human characters. And whether it is falling out of a portal or witnessing a debris field in action, every second is stunning with Derek Williams & Jordan Rampel on cinematography. Rob Simonsen is even an absolute win of a composer because captivates in being exhilarating enough to feel such joy. Like a lot of past alien movies, connection is a big piece of the narrative that is done a little differently. What is done differently by the directing team of Adrian Molina, Domee Shi & Madeline Sharafran and co-writers Julia Cho, Mark Hammer & Mike Jones are able to teach us the essential patience that makes connection special overtime. If you rush that feeling, especially with the people you love and share grief with, then it’s gonna be only harder to find any belonging. This is the dynamic between the titular lead and his aunt who are all over the place as neither of them were prepared for the changes that came their way. Yonas Kibreab is a delight as Elio because while wanting to give his big heart to whoever’s willing to take it, you can relate to how his loss leads to him most impulsive as he presumes his aunt’s cancelled aspirations make him a burden and wants to be somewhere that won’t make him feel such. In reality, you do see Zoe Saldana express how overwhelmed Olga is from the voice alone, but is valid since neither of them were prepared to lose family like that and no one can ever be. She does her best in powering through because she was trained to do that. Of course she was heartbroken not getting to be an astronaut, but she lost a brother and she knew processing that was more important, thus not wanting to give up on her nephew no matter how different their brains were. Had she not went to the same beach he went with whatever hope she had left, he would’ve not seen how much she really cared. Ironically, his return from space did lead to her living the dream in an unconventional manner. Until that happened, it was nice to see Elio finally find acquaintances as unexpected as it sounded, that would in fact help him properly expand his horizons enough to officially befriend Bryce as shown in the mid credit scene. Of course each member of the Communiverse stood out for being as welcoming as he hoped, none of them matched the bond he got with Glordon. Voiced by Remy Edgerly, the kid alien is Elio’s true equal for not just matching such gentleness, but also relating to feeling misunderstood by family. When you got a father who’s lived a generation defined by the need of superiority and fiercely voiced by Brad Garrett, you sure have a polar opposite debacle. Grigon may be an overbearing father with his expectations, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care since his perspective is about wanting what’s best for him. Because he never asked before what his son wanted and thought mostly with violence is where he can be mistaken to be a villain. Had Glordon not been in a vulnerable position he put himself in accidentally, his dad would never take the time to listen. Getting to see the Hylurgian father-son pair find common ground is what inspires Elio to stay on Earth because he chose to stop thinking about himself for a change, starting to notice how his affect those around him. With a more clear conscience, he can continue his life happier state his parents would’ve wanted for him. The fact he can still use radios to keep in touch Glordon as the mid credit scene reveals, then he’s got all the luck needed to have it both ways and he can share that with the people he cares about. This movie is so much fun, but even fun stuff like this have some head scratching moments. Like it’s one thing for Bryce to choose meeting Elio at night when he had all day, it’s kind of a surprise Elio never touched Olga’s computer to try messaging the aliens from there. If he’s that desperate to leave earth, he could’ve tried that while overhearing Melmac pick up a signal. Hell, I’m even surprised Olga chooses the day of dropping off Elio to camp to admit she went to the same one before. It’s gonna be a given Elio is gonna be against it, but Olga should’ve led with this fact if she wants him to be comfortable with her decision. It even felt like a trip how the Communiverse’s universal translator picked up on his fictional Elio-ese language, yet doesn’t pick up that his ‘Uh’ was a simple pause and not part of his planet’s name. It’s then ridiculous how Grigon doesn’t have a more secure prison for unfamiliar species like Elio. Had he redesigned the place, Elio would’ve never met Glordon even if that meant a possible war with earth due to holding the boy prisoner. And how is anyone allowed to casually make clones the way Elio does? The Communiverse is gambling here because anyone could abuse it to the point of being a traitor or an unconfined prank and there lucky that hadn’t happened yet. The only other thing that doesn’t make sense of cloning is that Other Elio doesn’t even replicate the left eye under the eyepatch. Either one should’ve thought of that for the sake of making it all the more believable to Olga. Also, why was the portal back to earth in the sky? If Questa found out Elio’s just a kid, she should’ve tried to leave him on the ground. That was weirder than Ooooo opening a portal in earth’s orbit instead of on the actual planet. And if we’re gonna talk about high odds, I wouldn’t say Elio conveniently being in the same beach as Olga when being sent back, but Melmac knowing Bryce in the same radio club. Ignore these things however, then you can still identify Elio as another hit for Pixar in terms of being fun and thoughtful throughout, earning the Animated Feature Oscar nomination in the process. If you dig sci fi, then this might be up your alley.