Review: Disney, Pixar's ‘Elio' channels '80s nostalgia and science in new adventure
We are not. At least not in ' Elio,' in which a grieving, lonely boy improbably becomes Earth's representative in a galactic dispute.
The movie's '80s vibe extends beyond references to Sagan, the planetary scientist whose PBS limited series 'Cosmos' became a phenomenon, back when the national public broadcaster was fully funded and not a target in the culture wars. In fact, 'Elio' would fit perfectly on the Blockbuster shelf (if the video rental chain was still around) next to other '80s kid-powered movies such as 'The Goonies,' 'Explorers' and of course 'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.' The title of the animated film itself is a nod to that era, with screenwriters Julia Cho, Mark Hammer and Mike Jones naming Elio afterElliott, the boy played by Henry Thomas in Steven Spielberg's classic.
When the movie opens, Elio (voiced with depth and sensitivity by Yonas Kibreab) is mourning the recent deaths of his parents. He is taken in by his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who is in the U.S. Air Force Space Command tracking junk debris in space. But Olga finds Elio to be a handful, and the boy feels lost and alone.
His imagination is sparked by a planetarium show about the Voyager space probe, with narration by Sagan, and begins to long to be abducted by aliens. He spends hours on the beach drawing messages in the sand that he hopes the aliens will see.
One evening while on the base with his aunt, Elio overhears one of the technicians say he thinks he has intercepted an alien transmission. The boy sneaks into the command center and contacts the aliens, and soon he is transported across the galaxy to a place called the Communiverse that seems like a Mad magazine parody of ' Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.'
Elio is mistaken as the leader of Earth, and tries to mediate a dispute between the war-like Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) and the population of the Communiverse while simultaneously striking up a friendship with the lord's son Glordon (Remy Edgerly).
Directed by the Oscar-winning Domee Shi (' Turning Red '), Alameda native Madeline Sharafian and Adrian Molina (' Coco '), the visually appealing 'Elio' moves confidently and delicately handles themes of isolation, grief, family strife and friendship.
And Sagan provides the coda, so it's not just the children in the audience who are transported to another time and place, but the adults as well.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
What if we've been thinking about dark matter all wrong, scientist wonders
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Dark matter could be made from tiny black holes formed when so-called "dark baryons" collapse, scientists suggest. Or, alternatively, dark matter could be a type of particle created by a form of Hawking radiation on the cosmic horizon. Here's what all that means. Dark matter is the substance that appears to make up about 27% of our universe, compared to the 5% of our universe composed of "normal" matter. Scientists certainly know dark matter exists due to some peculiar effects observed in the cosmos that normal matter can't account for. However, nobody knows what dark matter is made of. For decades, the leading candidate has been WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. But as the search for WIMPs begins to falter with experiments continuing to turn up empty handed, new theories of dark matter are starting to surface. Among them are two new models developed by Stefano Profumo, who is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of California, San Diego — and his ideas take a very different view of the dark-matter problem. "My attitude is that we've tried very hard to think about dark matter as a particle, but it hasn't worked out so far," Profumo told "I think it's natural to take a break and look at the whole thing from a distance, and wonder whether we are fundamentally thinking about this in the wrong way." In one paper, Profumo considers whether the "dark sector" could be what gives birth to dark matter. By dark sector, he isn't referring to how our universe is governed by dark matter and dark energy. Instead, he's referring to a kind of "mirror world" of particles that interact via forces that our world's kind of matter does not experience. Profumo says the concept is not as strange as it may sound. For example, he highlights how the quarks inside protons and neutrons are bound together by the strong nuclear force. "But then take electrons, which are absolutely blind to the strong force. They don't feel it at all. For them the strong force is a dark sector," said Profumo. "It's common in the Standard Model." Dark baryons would be the equivalent of protons or neutrons in this dark sector, except that they could contain more than three quarks, Profumo says, and therefore be more massive. The next step in the researcher's theory was inspired by his teenage son asking whether a sufficiently massive particle could collapse under its own gravity to form a mini black hole. The dark baryons in the dark sector, if it so exists, could be massive enough to do just that — and these tiny black holes could then be rife in the universe and collectively form what we call dark matter. "I've worked with people who have thought very deeply about a dark-sector equivalent to the strong force, but they've never really pushed all the way to the black hole frontier," said Profumo. "But I really think it is a possibility that we need to take into consideration." Black holes, large or small, are surrounded by an invisible boundary called the event horizon, inside which gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. However, the event horizon is 'hot' – particles created at the boundary by quantum effects can radiate away as what we call Hawking radiation (named for famous physicist Stephen Hawking, who is credited with the idea). Over time, Hawking radiation removes mass and energy from a black hole, causing it to gradually evaporate. For supermassive black holes, this would take an unimaginably long time — 10^100 years at least. However, black holes on the smallest scales — what we call the Planck scale —- can evaporate in an amount of time less than the age of the universe. However, if we make certain assumptions about the nature of these black holes formed by the collapse of dark baryons, then their Hawking radiation could become suppressed, preventing them from evaporating and enabling them to act as dark matter. Meanwhile, Profumo's other idea plays on the concept of Hawking radiation as well, but in a completely novel way. We live in a universe that is expanding at an accelerating rate, taking regions of the cosmos so far away that their light will never reach us. This leads to a boundary, or a cosmic horizon, which defines the edge of the visible universe. There could be much more of the universe beyond this horizon, but we will never see it. Now, let's go back in time to the moment of the Big Bang. The universe began with a burst of expansionist energy known as inflation. This inflationary period lasted a tiny fraction of a second. However, some models also posit that there was a second brief burst of expansionary energy that followed inflation. "It is basically a period of mini-inflation," said Profumo. "It could be associated with inflation and how it ends, or it could be driven by a similar set-up to inflation." This second expansionary period created cosmic horizons like the cosmic horizon that borders the visible universe today. However, the visible universe today is 93 billion light-years across, with Earth at its center (the concept of a "visible" universe is very observer dependent — observers in different parts of the cosmos will see a different volume of observable universe centered around themselves). The vast size of the visible universe means the temperature at the cosmic horizon is very low because space itself has become so spread out. However, during the second burst of inflation, the universe was still incredibly compact and the temperature at the horizon was extremely hot. Profumo realized these early cosmic horizons could act like event horizons; indeed, the concept is a bit like a black hole but turned inside-out because everything beyond the cosmic horizon is forever disconnected from us, just like everything inside a black hole's event horizon is separated from us. And just as Hawking radiation is emitted from a black hole's event horizon, Profumo suggests the cosmic horizon could also experience Hawking radiation in the same manner, and that the energy of this radiation could transform into some kind of dark matter particle. "Maybe [dark matter] is as simple as that," said Profumo. "Early on, the universe behaved like a black hole, and there was stuff sprinkled into the universe because the universe was evaporating in the same way that a black hole evaporates." This might seem somewhat arbitrary, because the location of the cosmic horizon depends upon the location of the observer. However, because the universe is homogenous (the same at every point on large scales) and isotropic (the same in all directions) — two truisms that we call the Cosmological Principle —- then any two observers should see the exact same amount of dark matter, wherever they are. Profumo isn't necessarily saying dark matter has to be one of these two possibilities; indeed, the fact that he has developed two theories implies that he's reluctant to nail his colors to any particular mast. "The aim of the game is to understand the breadth and scope of what dark matter could be, and to cast the net as wide as possible," said Profumo. RELATED STORIES — What is dark matter? — 'Dark matter is more valuable than gold': Wobbly galaxies help shine a light on the universe's strangest stuff — Captured dark matter may transform some 'failed stars' into 'dark dwarfs' All we know for sure about dark matter is that it interacts via gravity, and yet despite its mystery it is utterly dominant in how matter in the universe assembles itself into galaxies. Almost a century since Fritz Zwicky first suggested the existence of dark matter, and about half a century since Vera Rubin confirmed the need for dark matter in our universe, we still don't know anything more about it. Experiments can narrow down dark matter's properties, so the more ideas we have on the table, the more likely it is that we will be able to match one of them up to the observed properties of dark matter. Profumo's dark sector–black hole hypothesis was published on May 9 in Physical Review D, and his cosmic horizon model was published in the same journal on July 8. Solve the daily Crossword
New York Post
6 hours ago
- New York Post
Bob Ross paintings easily surpass estimated sale prices at auction, marking milestone for the late artist
Money does grow on his 'happy little trees!' A pair of Bob Ross paintings sold for double and triple their estimated selling prices at a recent auction — shattering sales records for the mild-mannered late artist. Two oil-on-canvas works from the 'Joy of Painting' star, both depicting serene mountain and lake scenes, raked in some serious green at Bonhams' American Art Online sale, which ended on Aug. 7. 'Lake Below Snow-Capped Peaks and Cloudy Sky' fetched $114,800 — double what it was estimated to sell for — and 'Lake Below Snow-Covered Mountains and Clear Sky' took in $95,750, triple its anticipated price tag. 'I can tell you that Bob would have been quite shy to learn that his paintings are now selling at six figures. He was never really that interested in his finished works, Bob was more fascinated with the process of painting and sharing that with other people,' Joan Kowalski, president of Bob Ross Inc., told The Post. 3 Bob Ross' painting 'Lake Below Snow-Capped Peaks and Cloudy Sky' fetched $114,800 at Bonhams' American Art Online auction. Bonhams 'Truthfully, I can still hear him saying something like, 'You don't want my paintings, you want to create your own and hang them proudly on your wall.'' The record-breaking paintings, which both date to 1990-1991, caught the eye of five or six bidders during the Madison Avenue auction house's sale, which started on July 28. The pricey pieces managed to dethrone Ross' previous auction high-water mark, set at $55,000 on July 25 for the sale of another landscape, 'Snow-capped barn and trees behind a post and wire fence,' at Eldred's Auction Gallery in Dennis, Massachusetts. Ross, who died in 1995 at the age of 52, became a household name with a cult-like following for hosting the PBS series 'The Joy of Painting.' 3 'Lake Below Snow-Covered Mountains and Clear Sky' took in $95,750, triple its anticipated price tag. Bonhams On the instructional series, which aired over 400 episodes from 1983 to 1994, the Florida native, who had a net worth of $1 million, taught viewers the art of landscape painting. The paintings he created for the show are owned by Bob Ross Inc., and rarely hit the auction block, as per Barnebys. 3 Ross, who died in 1995 at the age of 52, became a household name for hosting the PBS series 'The Joy of Painting.' Over the last year, only seven have been purchased at auction for between $30,000 and $55,000, according to Artnet. The most recent ones — which were owned by private collectors in Florida and then passed down to other sellers — mark a milestone for Ross as the first that have gotten close to or exceeded $100,000.
Epoch Times
14 hours ago
- Epoch Times
‘Sesame Street' Stars Elmo, Abby Cadabby Make Grand Ole Opry Debut
Elmo and Abby Cadabby, stars of the PBS children's television show 'Sesame Street,' made their Grand Ole Opry debut this week, gracing Nashville's most historic stage in celebration of the live music venue's 100th anniversary. The two Muppet characters stepped into the famed Opry circle on Thursday night to perform alongside two familiar faces from the world of country music.
