Elemental Review

June 15, 2023 at 6:02pm
By Jason Stettner

Elemental is a Pixar film that tries to do a little bit too much of everything. It’s about living up to your cultural history, about love conquering all and also about the divides of types of people. Also randomly a scene where suddenly there’s an issue with someone coming from wealth, that was out of nowhere. At least, those are some of the things that this film is about and it suffers for that because they couldn’t come up with a defined direction.

It doesn’t balance all of these items very well and it seemed like they couldn’t decide if this was a tough stance on society or just a romantic comedy. That confusion is seen consistently as the narrative just goes back and forth way too much making it feel strangely muddled. It starts off fairly simply telling the story of this fire family immigrating to Elemental City. Time passes and Ember (Leah Lewis) grows with the desired pressure of running her family’s store.

She has a temper that she just can’t seem to control. This causes a pipe to burst and a strange rush of water which delivers alongside it Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie). He cries a lot, but needs to write up the place for its many violations of code. This creates a chase of sorts and eventually the two work together to deal with the problem as it’s beneficial for both. It’s very much your typical romantic comedy at the start and then it just kind of stretches on while adding too many layers of complexity that kind of make it a mess to follow.

There’s this romantic object the two share and it sort of gets passed between them like three times which is ridiculously weird. That’s just an example, and other is Gale (Wendi McLendon-Covey) being a boss cloud that’s in it for a few minutes but suddenly there for a big emotional moment that doesn’t really make sense as you basically forget the cloud is even a character.

In Pixar fashion this is actually quite a visually stunning film. The use of fire mixed with water or other elements was really a vibrant treat to the eyes. There are some neat reflective spots and seeing the two elements mix was really intriguing.

The city in general is fairly cool to take in but I couldn’t help but compare it to Zootopia whereas in that world the city is much more awesome and lively. The voice work here was great, Lewis does great work with Ember. I also found Athie did the crying bits very well as the water folks are rather wet. When it comes to the humor aspects I did find a number of spots to get a laugh, though a lot of it is sort of a groan.

The various kids at the screening I attended were not at all interested, many were moving about in their chairs or distracted. Laughs wise it was only adults as well, so keep that in mind if you’re aiming at bringing someone from the younger audience to this as the many kids there seemed bored which isn’t great.

I don’t think I heard someone younger laugh once, honestly. When you’re at a screening with a ton of children present it’s a really great way to see how the target audience vibes with a film and there was little to no interest I saw from any of the many present there.

The Conclusion

Elemental starts off with a flurry of exciting energy and vibrancy, but ultimately falls flat being an over-stuffed look at too many concepts. It really is kind of just a straight up romantic comedy that becomes too all over the place as the run time goes on.

It really does feel sort of long when watching it and some of the moments do offer a groan. The younger audience in my screening did not seem to vibe with what was going on, not necessarily impacting my thoughts of course but something to mention as I know the target audience for this one.

The lead couple are rather cute in their meets and I liked when they were vibing. It’s just, rather strange that there are so many complex issues being presented here as simplifying them could have provided a stronger, more impactful case.

It just came across as somewhat bloated and heavy for the type of movie this was. It is a visual spectacle at times for sure, with that not being enough to carry it either. I really wanted to like this one as it started out so well, but by the end it was largely forgettable and mostly confusing.

Elemental Review at Theater with Standard Viewing
Screening Provided by Disney

Rating Overall: 4.8