Elio
Starring Yonas Kibreab, Remy Edgerly and Zoe Saldaña
PG
3.75/5
Elio is a touching, visually resplendent sci-fi family adventure that doesn’t fully realise its own disturbing implications.
After achieving his lifelong dream of being abducted by aliens, eleven-year old Elio Solis (Yonas Kibreab) must save the Communiverse, an interstellar diplomatic organisation, from a warlord’s wrath.
Elio is a cute, swiftly-paced adventure with endearing characters and truly stunning art direction.
The vibrant Communiverse headquarters brings to mind the Citadel in the Mass Effect games and the Ouster Swarm from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion novels, and the computer-generated presentation allows the filmmakers to cut loose with truly alien character designs, as opposed to humanoids with odd complexions or foreheads in so much other sci-fi.
In a possible nod to the first Star Trek movie, Elio’s plot cleverly uses the Voyager 1 space-probe and its famous golden record as the springboard for Elio’s interest in aliens, though I wish Voyager remained relevant beyond the first act.
While Elio is kind, loyal and determined, he has very little character development, experiences no lasting consequences for lying to the Communiverse, and his self-reflection on whether he was the unruly, obsessive problem on Earth holds little weight when he was right all along about the existence of aliens.
Elio quickly befriends Glordon (Remy Edgerly), the compassionate prince of a warlike race, and his arc of not wanting to follow in his brutal father’s footsteps is much more interesting than Elio’s journey.
The plot also uses cloning for subterfuge, and feels flippant in how it treats these near-indistinguishable copies with their own consciousnesses; a father technically kills his own son, and you wonder how this didn’t occur to the filmmakers.
If you can ignore the existential terrors the film raises, Elio is an energetic, moving and visually breathtaking family film currently playing at the Memorial Hall.
– Seth Lukas Hynes
