There’s a line in Interstellar that’s become something of an ill omen: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now, we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” Because even though films continue to lead us into space, it’s rare that you get one like Pixar’s Elio where characters think of the cosmos in terms of infinite possibility and connection rather than a place where landmark-destroying alien threats come from.
It’s powerful seeing the newly orphaned Elio (Yonas Kibreab) lie down in a NASA museum and hear about the Voyager spacecraft taking the loneliest journey of all humankind’s creations while bathed in the light of the stars. Elio dreams in the wake of loss, and between his sheer, uncontrollable weirdness and the aggravation of being constantly dragged back to Earth by his frazzled military officer aunt (Zoe Saldaña), he concludes that space is the place.
Thus, the film’s little Mexican-Dominican hero spends most of his days trying to find ways to hitchhike his way off this planet, which we see during a montage set to Talking Heads’s “Once in a Lifetime,” a perfect weirdo’s lament if ever there was one. And throughout all of his planning, it’s very hard not to sympathize with Elio, who dares to envision a world of imagination, of advancement and goodwill in humanity, has to watch the least curious people walking the Earth grind the will to dream into the dirt, and he can’t help but resent them all for it.
Elio is poignantly attuned to how something tiny dies inside its hero every time he has to bear witness to that. But he eventually catches a lucky break, finding himself in the right place and right time at his aunt’s military base to make first contact with an alien armada of the best and brightest minds in the galaxy, who promptly assume that he’s their leader and bring him aboard.
Why would those minds not do more research about the planet their leader hails from? That’s one of a few lingering questions anyone versed in hard sci-fi might have along the way. Ultimately, though, that matters less as Elio becomes less a story of “first contact” than one about a child opening his heart and finding his community in the places he didn’t expect.
That’s no small feat here, as Elio’s aliens are truly some of the most, well, alien character designs to grace the big screen in quite some time, which gives an extra boost to the film’s core theme. Elio’s villains are essentially human-sized leeches wearing sea-creature carapaces as armor, and it’s their despotic leader Grigon’s (Brad Garrett) creepy-looking but adorable-acting son Glordon (Remy Edgerly) who winds up being the best friendship of Elio’s life.
It’s the wrong assumption that all relationships are interchangeable that nearly dooms Elio, and, in the film’s most humanistic moment, it’s his planet’s collective of nerds who save him. Elio’s best trait is the one that permeates every truly great first-contact story—not just the hope that our first meeting with the strangest of strangers is benevolent, or that the universe is too vast to determine they all wish good or ill on us, but that connecting with humanity still has value.
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