Colors pop, lines flow and an alien world shimmers like the Vegas strip after dark in Pixar’s latest, “Elio,” a lackluster science-fiction adventure about a lonely boy and extraterrestrials who come in peace, except when they don’t. By turns appealing and drearily familiar, the movie offers the expected visual pleasures and characters who range from the gently exaggerated to the hyperbolic. Some have rubbery countenances and curious appendages; others have enormous eyes that water with emotion. Yours may glaze over in boredom.
A morality tale with far-out friendlies and a glowering, growling Marvelesque villain, “Elio” has predictable Pixar bright spots, but the story is a drag. It tracks the title character (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), an 11-year-old who’s been recently and mysteriously orphaned. He now lives with his aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force Major who monitors space junk at the coastal California base where she’s stationed. Loving yet clueless, she is at a loss on how to raise a child, especially one who’s unhappy and feels out of place with her or anywhere. (Her parenting book is studded with a rainbow of sticky notes.) Less comically, Olga is especially ill-equipped to deal with a grieving child, a failing that she shares with the filmmakers.
Orphans are a storybook staple — from Disney’s original “Snow White” to “Lilo & Stitch” — though not on Planet Pixar. Yet to judge by this movie’s at times abruptly fluctuating tones and eagerness to dry every tear, Elio’s greatest issue isn’t that his parents are dead but that the filmmakers are uncomfortable with his grief. Early on, while out with his aunt, he hides under a table and weeps. Soon, though, the story has revved up, and he’s humorously sending messages into space begging to be taken away from Olga, Earth, everything. “Aliens abduct me!!!,” Elio scrawls on a beach, before lying down and grinning hopefully at the sky.
After some more narrative busyness, character development and scene changes, the filmmakers grant Elio’s wish and send him off on his hoped-for cosmic adventure. One evening, while Olga is at work and Elio waits for deliverance, he is pulled from the beach on a beam of light, an image of alien abduction with a suggestively rapturous religious undertone. Once he achieves liftoff, the movie starts to as well. It grows more vividly hued and nicely unbound, and Elio is soon careering through bursts of color and graphic forms, much like the astronaut in the oft-copied lysergic star gate sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Elio predictably exits our solar system and ends up in the Communiverse, a sparkly, kaleidoscopic alternative realm where the directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi modestly cut loose. (The script is by Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones.) A jumble of landscapes rich in lightly phantasmagoric embellishments, it functions as a kind of hangout and otherworldly United Nations for extraterrestrials. There, Elio zips past terrains with an array of biomorphic and geometric forms. He also, via a translator, chats up others, including a talking, floating blue supercomputer, Ooooo (Shirley Henderson), a kind of A.I. Jiminy Cricket, if one that tends to look like a dialogue bubble with eyes and a mouth.
Elio’s introductory tour conveys a sense of happiness and discovery that carries you along with him and breathes air into the story. It’s too bad then that it quickly takes a familiar turn when a gaggle of chromatically vivid, polymorphically diverse ambassadors at the Communiverse ask him to help with a warlord, Grigon (Brad Garrett). Elio eagerly steps up and makes an alliance with Grigon’s son, Glordon (the expressive Remy Edgerly), who looks like a well-fed worm with no obvious eyes but with many teeth. The kids bond and briefly take in the sights, darting here and slurping drinks there. It’s an interlude that would be more diverting if it didn’t seem like they were beta-testing a new Disney amusement park.
That’s not unexpected; many entertainments for adults and children sell branded merch. The problem is that there’s not much more to “Elio” once the kids become friends and this world’s novelty wears off, giving way to banality. Feelings are shared, if largely for the viewers; minor family issues are raised (and resolved); clichés and contrivances pile up. Before long, the fleetingly liberated child and the filmmakers’ imaginative playfulness are boxed up, and the whole thing turns into yet another superhero adventure. A Marvel-lite episode follows before “Elio” scoots back to comfier Pixar-style territory. There’s no place like home, as another adventurer once put it, a reassuring life lesson that here feels more like creative surrender.
Elio
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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