Elemental, Should it Burn?

On June 16th, 2023, the movie Elemental was released, with many people rushing to their nearest movie theaters to see this new film. Expectations were very high, especially because of the high turnout for the movie, and the movie financially, was a huge success. CNN stated, “The animated love story is bearing down on $150 million in the US, meaning it will have earned five times its opening-weekend total – a multiple no Pixar movie has achieved since the original ‘Toy Story.’”

This feat was an amazingly impressive one, to say the least. And since most modern movie studios care more about the money than the actual movie quality, this was a huge success. However, if you decide to take a tiny peek behind the covers of high reviews, high box office turnouts, and a seemingly heartwarming story,  what you’ll see is an absolute piece of garbage. 

Elemental, despite trying to be a movie that is supposed to be a metaphor between multiple elements, puts most of its energy into the failing romance of Wade and Ember, who are – you guessed it, the water guy and the fire girl. Even though the movie tries to symbolize racial inequality with inequality between the elements, they only give the water and fire elements a spotlight- just because of those elements having the main character in them. 

Elemental isn’t a great movie, at best. The plot is bland and I could predict every plotline.. The characters are underdeveloped with barely any change in their character, excluding the character development of Clod. Just to explain a bit, Clod is a side character who appears in two scenes. Despite that being a sarcastic remark, it might genuinely be true considering how appalling the character development is.

The writers maybe could have built up that they liked each other without making the entire movie revolving around it. And adding to that they would have made the problem a systematic issue, rather than just a cultural one, which they were beginning to show at the beginning of the movie. There is very little development leading up to the fire of the romance, and I can very clearly confirm that the joke I just made about the “Fire” of the romance was better than all of the jokes in the movie, with the movie itself being a very clear exception. Along with the lack of character development, there are some very unrealistic plot holes in the movie. One part that especially bothered me is where Wade almost ruins the entire life of Ember and then tries to act like he’s the victim.

Elemental was a horrible movie with a huge lack of character development and sufficient and realistic plotline. The one positive thing I can say about the movie is the animation and soundtrack. The animation is very advanced, and the music soundtrack is so good it makes some of the horrible scenes seem half decent, which is a huge accomplishment.

Overall, Elemental is extremely overrated by the mainstream media, and its lack of sufficient plot elements and character development is very clear if you don’t just watch the movie blindly. But the one thing I know for sure is that since the movie made huge profits, Disney is going to call this a huge success.