Elemental

I applaud Pixar for trying to step out of their comfort zone of kids on the run or characters trying to get home. And I applaud them for a visually stunning movie. But good lord, is this agonizingly bland, and hopelessly jumbled. The rom-com element of Elemental is cliche-ridden. One of them is from privilege, the other is the child of immigrants and from the wrong side of the tracks. They’re two different races too, so, we get a racial parable on top of the class one, and both are so heavy handed, the movie is wearing lead boxing gloves. Is there a break up to kick off the third act? Sure is. Is there a world-wrecking cataclysm that brings them together? You know it. This movie building blocks are so thoroughly standard, one might think this movie was written by an AI. The problem is, the elements don’t mesh. It has to pinball between the Pixar plot and the rom-com plot instead of weaving them together, and it leaves both feeling underserved and underdeveloped. But the biggest sin is the whole conceit of the movie. Everybody being made of one of four base natural elements is at the heart of the movie, but the movie has no consistent internal logic whatsoever. The fire people burn everything they touch, except when they don’t. Why do they set a doorbell on fire but can carry cardboard boxes with ease? How can they melt sand into glass, but don’t melt plastic or superheat metal? The movie can’t answer that, so it just rolls with the contradictions, piling them on top of each other. And the big romantic moment requires a full and final disregard of reality that had the side effect of murdering any sense of stakes the movie wants to build. Why should I care about any threats, literal or existential, if the movie can’t explain itself. Why should I be invested in the lives of the two leads and whether or not they’ll make it when the movie says it is willing to invalidate the laws of science it wants to acknowledge to make the plot happen? The answer is that I wasn’t invested and I didn’t care. This is a concept in search of a movie, but the concept kills any chance a movie has of working, and the conflicting movies it tries to be are assembly line standard. It’s not as lifeless as The Good Dinosaur, or as grating as Cars 2, but this is a real stinker in Pixar’s library.