It is going to be a great week for fans of Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist who gained great media success in the seventies and eighties and caused generations of children to fall in love with space. I am among them. This coming weekend, Chuck’s Life will arrive in theaters, a magical film that opens and closes with a segment from Sagan’s television series, Cosmos. And this week, Pixar’s new animated film, Elio, also arrives in theaters, and it too opens and closes with Sagan’s voice, who educated the world to look up at the sky, gaze at the stars, and believe that perhaps somewhere in the heavens there is intelligent life and that we are not alone in the universe.
The plot starting point of Elio is taken straight from Sagan’s book Contact (which became a wonderful film with Jodie Foster), so its first act is great and full of promise. I have not enjoyed a film opening this much in a long time, which openly presents its inspirations and loves, and the narrative possibilities it contains. And it has been a long time since I saw such a huge gap between the first half hour of a film and the hour that follows it, which misses every possible opportunity to be magical, wonderful, exciting, and inspiring.
Because it is a Pixar film, one cannot ignore the fact that it is very cute and has no moments of suffering or boredom, but it is simply a missed opportunity. The clear feeling is that those who wrote and directed the first act are not the ones who created the rest of the film.Elio is a child whose parents died, and he is raised by his aunt, an air force officer who dreams of becoming an astronaut.
Elio discovers the planetarium and the journey of the Voyager spacecraft, and he falls in love with the idea of spaceships and aliens, and every night he lies on the beach calling for aliens to come and take him away. Then the aliens arrive, and Elio is willingly abducted into outer space.
This opening is heavily influenced by the dreams of Steven Spielberg. Elio’s beginning also seems influenced by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the hero dreams of entering a spaceship and meeting aliens, and also by E.T., whose hero has a nearly identical name (Elliot), and there is no chance this is a coincidence. Show the first half hour of the film to any child who loves spaceships and ask them to continue the story themselves, and you will get better ideas than those the Pixar screenwriters created, in a script that feels like a creature cut and pasted from unrelated ideas switching every twenty minutes with unsuccessful character designs.
It could have been an inverted E.T instead of a child adopting an alien, an alien adopts a child. But the film’s creators who really changed during production pasted together a jumble of half-baked plot ideas, almost always predictable and very mechanical. Pixar films excel when they tell stories that seem to emerge from the minds of children. Elio fails because it feels almost frightened, as if it was written out of parental responsibility rather than childhood fascination. Pixar films always carry a moral lesson, but Elio is didactic and educational. The saddest part is that Elio, and his aunt, dream of leaving Earth to move to another planet, but the film does not fulfill their dream. The filmmakers were influenced by Spielberg and Carl Sagan, and it seems they understood nothing.
Since its American premiere last week, entertainment reporters have been trying to understand why this film, which earned so little at the box office in its opening week, may become the biggest box office failure in Pixar and Disney’s history. This is while another alien-and-girl encounter in a Disney film, the Lilo & Stitch remake, became one of the most commercially successful films of the year. Many theories were proposed marketing, branding, corporate but anyone who saw the film with an audience knows the answer compared to Pixar’s usual products, it is simply not good enough, and it fails to engage the audience.