Elio: A Biblical Worldview Movie Review for Families

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Hello, friends! On today's podcast, we're going to be looking at the movie Elio and exploring three biblical worldview conversations we can have with our kids after seeing this film.

As I've mentioned on previous Foundation Worldview podcasts, I will most likely never encourage you to take your children to see a movie. The reason for that is the media we consume is a matter of conscience—so it's a matter of your conscience whether you choose to take your children to see Elio or not. However, for those who are planning to take their kids to see it, I think there are three biblically-based worldview conversations that we can have with our kids.

That's the topic we're diving into today on the Foundation Worldview Podcast, where we typically answer your questions so you can seek to equip the kids in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. I'm your host, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and I'm thrilled that you've joined me for this episode today.

About the Movie Elio

When I went to the theaters, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I knew it was about a kid who was a little bit out of the ordinary and that it had to do with aliens, but I went in somewhat blind.

If you're not familiar with the storyline, this is very much a typical Pixar movie. It ended up having a really good storyline. On a personal note, it wasn't one of my favorite Pixar movies—I thought there were others with stronger storylines—however, it still had a good storyline.

The main character, Elio Solis, is orphaned at the beginning of the movie. You don't see him losing his parents, but you learn that when he was very young, he lost his parents. He is raised by his aunt Olga, who is a major in the Air Force. We learn at the beginning of the movie that his aunt has given up her dreams of joining the space program in order to be at home and raise Elio.

As Elio grows, he has an obsession with space and aliens. He's really just a fun but quirky kid, and he doesn't really have any friends. He's completely obsessed with aliens and wants to be abducted by aliens. In the movie, he eventually does get to meet aliens and goes on this adventure of learning about friendship, love, and self-sacrifice.

As is typical with most Pixar movies, the characters are really likable and there are good lessons in the story. I was really grateful that there was nothing—at least nothing that I saw in this movie—that was pushing a liberal agenda, like some of the more recent Pixar movies like Turning Red and Lightyear that were pushing things most Christian parents would want to keep their kids away from.

I didn't see any of that in Elio. The only thing I really noticed that I thought, "Oh, some parents aren't going to like this," is towards the end of the movie. As Elio is making friends and apologizing for some of the ways he's treated people, he says, "Sometimes I can be a butt"—which really wasn't needed or called for in the movie, but just so you know that's in there.

A Word of Advice

One thing I was thinking as I went to see this movie—and I was just relieved that there wasn't a lot of the typical agenda-pushing in this movie—is if you do plan to take your kids to see this movie, I would encourage you to do so sooner rather than later. The sooner you go to the box office to see a film, the more it speaks to the company (in this case, Pixar and Disney) that this is the type of movie we want more of in the future.

So just a word of advice: if you plan to see it, I would encourage you to use your dollar to speak and say, "Yes, this is the type of storyline we want in the future. We don't want more pushing of liberal agendas."

Three Biblical Worldview Conversations

As we think through this movie, I think there are three different biblically-based questions or conversations we can have with our kids.

1. What Evidence of Love Did We See Characters Display?

The first question I think we can ask kids after watching this movie is: What evidence of love did we see characters display in this movie?

That was one thing I was really impressed with in the film—so many characters demonstrate actual love. We know our culture is pushing an agenda that "love is love," and love is basically viewed as anything that makes someone feel positively. Biblically, we know that love is giving of ourselves to meet the needs of others—the actual needs of others, not just a felt need.

So I recommend asking our kids this question, then taking them to Scripture to look at what love actually is. A great passage to start with is 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, which reads:

"Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends."

We can ask our kids, "What truths about love are revealed in this passage?" and talk through the different characteristics of love.

I also recommend taking our kids to John 15:13, where Jesus says: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends."

We can ask our kids, "What truth does this verse reveal about love?" It reveals that the greatest type of love is being willing to lay down our life for another. That is something displayed throughout the entire movie. As I was watching, I was thinking, "Wow, this movie is clearly showing how Jesus has triumphed—we are viewing self-sacrificial love as the highest virtue."

Examples of Self-Sacrificial Love in the Movie

We can talk through with our kids the different characters that demonstrate self-sacrificial love:

Aunt Olga gave up the life she wanted to raise Elio. It keeps coming up throughout the movie how it was her desire to join the space program, and people keep asking her why she's not joining. She says, "I have other responsibilities." She was willing to give up her dream for Elio—that was, in one sense, laying her life down.

Also, at one point when Elio is actually abducted by aliens, they create a clone and send the clone back to live with Aunt Olga. At first, it seems like Olga is super happy with this clone because he is reliable and compliant in ways that Elio was not. But you realize as the movie progresses that Olga knew Elio so well that she realized something was amiss when the clone was there—she eventually figured out it was a clone. Towards the end of the movie, she was willing to sacrifice herself so that Elio could save his friend Gordon. (She does not die in the movie—spoiler alert—but she was willing to put herself in harm's way so that Elio could save his friend.)

Elio also learns to truly love. At the end of the movie, Elio was willing to risk his life to rescue Gordon, his alien friend. There's a point where he could have just left Gordon alone to die, but he actually seeks to save him. At the end of the movie, Elio is given an ambassador's badge by the Universe (the alien commune that abducted him). He asks them, "Why are you giving this to me? I lied to you" (because throughout the film, he lies to them in different ways). They say, "Yes, you did lie, but you were willing to sacrifice yourself for another." It was Elio's self-sacrificial love that made them invite him into the Universe.

Lord Gron is an alien who loves fighting and is always threatening the commune. His son is Gordon, and Gordon does not want to become like his dad—he doesn't want to be a fighter, he just loves being friends with people. In the end, when Gordon is in danger, Lord Gron is willing to take off his protective armor (that makes him so strong and is his protective shield) and go save Gordon.

We see all throughout the movie with Olga, Elio, and Lord Gron this continual sacrificial love. This is something we want to point out to our kids. Then we can make the connection of how Jesus was the ultimate example of sacrificial love because not only did He give up His life for us, but He bore the full weight of God's wrath toward our sin. He was the perfect lamb, the perfect sacrifice. Through His death and resurrection, we are now reconciled to God.

I think this movie provides a great springboard for that conversation.

2. Information Coming from Intelligence (For Comparative Worldview Curriculum Users)

The second conversation we can have with our kids is one I'm going to outline, but this discussion is really just for those who have taken their kids through our Comparative Worldview curriculum. The reason is it would be too complicated to try to explain a whole unit in our curriculum and how to walk kids through that.

The second conversation we can have is about information coming from intelligence. For those of you who have taken your kids through our Comparative Worldview course, you know that the whole third unit is all on life and how life points to an intelligent designer.

As I was watching Elio, I was getting so excited because part of the storyline aligns exactly with the apologetic reasoning we walk kids through in our Comparative Worldview curriculum.

For those who have taken your kids through this course, you can ask your kids: When Olga saw the sentence "Bring us your leader" appear on her screen, why did she then realize there was some intelligence out there trying to communicate with her?

All throughout the beginning of the movie, Olga is getting frustrated with Elio because she's like, "There is no such thing as alien life. There is no life out there." She got really frustrated, and all of a sudden everything went blank on her screen, and suddenly there was this message that said, "Bring us your leader." She was like, "Oh my goodness," and then she started to think there might be alien life out there.

After you've asked your kids that question, I recommend walking them through the first three truths we cover in Unit 3 of the Comparative Worldview curriculum. Specifically, I recommend going back to the "What Caused This" activity in Unit 3, Lesson 2, and also the "Scrabble Scramble" game in Unit 3, Lesson 2. As you go through those two activities and connect them to what you saw in the movie, it will really help solidify the truth that information always comes from an intelligent source.

I was so excited when I saw this in the movie because it makes so clear that point we make in Unit 3 of the Comparative Worldview curriculum.

About Our Comparative Worldview Curriculum

For those who have never taken your kids through our Comparative Worldview curriculum, if you have kids between the ages of 8 and 11, I highly recommend that you check it out. The goal of the Comparative Worldview curriculum is that by the end of this curriculum, your kids will be so well-versed in the biblical worldview and in understanding competing worldviews that they'll be able to watch a movie like Elio (or any other developmentally appropriate movie) and pick out the different worldview themes on their own.

As full disclosure, this Comparative Worldview curriculum is not for every parent because it involves effort and consistency. It is 27 lessons long, and each lesson is between 30 and 45 minutes. So it involves you putting in effort and being consistent with it.

This curriculum is really designed for intentional parents who want to be proactive in training their children and avoid the future pain of realizing in the later adolescent or teen years that your kids have absorbed faulty ideas from the culture in their formative years that are just beginning to surface in those later years.

If that's the type of parent you are—if you are a really intentional parent and you seek to be proactive—I highly recommend that you check out our Comparative Worldview curriculum.

3. Why Do Humans Fear Being Alone?

The third question we can ask our kids is: Why do humans fear being alone?

Being alone and loneliness is a theme really woven throughout the entire movie. It was very interesting—at several points in the movie, there's the voice of Carl Sagan from his documentary Cosmos (Carl Sagan has been dead for a while now, and I think Cosmos, the original version, came out maybe in the '60s or '70s). Several points throughout the movie feature audio from that Cosmos series where Carl Sagan is saying, "Are we alone?"

What Carl Sagan was meaning in that quote is, "Is there other forms of life out there?" However, the way Pixar used that quote in the movie was to point to emotional loneliness—to humans feeling like they are alone.

There's one point in the movie where Elio is talking to Gordon and he says, "The only people who wanted me are gone" (talking about his parents). Then he says, "What if there's nothing about me to want?" This is a theme woven throughout the movie. In the end, Elio learns that his aunt Olga wants him—she didn't want a clone of him, she didn't want someone who behaved perfectly. She wanted him.

This theme of loneliness is something most humans experience. We can ask our kids: Why do humans fear being alone, just like Elio feared?

Then we can take our kids right to the source: Genesis 3:6-10. This passage reads:

"So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, 'Where are you?' And he said, 'I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.'"

In this passage, we see Adam and Eve rebel against God, and immediately they hide from one another—they realize they're naked and hide from one another. Then God comes and they hide from Him.

We can ask our kids, "What does this passage reveal about sin?" It reveals that sin causes isolation. Sin separates us from one another, and sin separates us from God. It's sin that causes loneliness or causes us to fear loneliness.

We can talk about how we as humans are designed in God's image. God is relational—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have always been in perfect loving relationship with one another. Because we bear God's image and because God is relational, we too are relational. But sin has damaged all of our relationships, which makes us fear loneliness. We were not designed to be alone.

God's Solution to Our Loneliness

We can take our kids to another passage of Scripture. I recommend first taking them to Romans 5:6-8, which reads:

"For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

We can also take our kids to Hebrews 13:5-6, which says:

"Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you.' So we can confidently say, 'The Lord is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?'"

After taking our kids to these two passages, we can ask them, "What do these passages reveal about us? About God? About loneliness?"

The Romans 5 passage reveals that God has pursued us—because of His great love for us, He was willing to sacrifice His Son for us. The Hebrews passage reveals that because of Christ's sacrifice, we are never truly alone.

So even when we feel lonely, we are not alone. Even in our sin, God loved us and made a way for us to be reconciled to Him. Will we still experience emotional loneliness on this earth? Yes, but we know the cause of that loneliness—it's sin, which separates us from one another and separates us from God. But we can recognize the truth that we are never truly alone because Jesus died to reconcile us to God, and God has promised that He will never leave us or forsake us.

Summary

Just as a reminder, the three questions we talked through are:

1. What evidence of love do we see characters display in this movie?
2. For those who have taken your kids through our Comparative Worldview curriculum: When Olga saw the sentence "Bring us your leader" appear on her screen, why did she then realize there was some intelligence out there trying to communicate with her?
3. Why do humans fear being alone?

I hope this content has been helpful for you if you are planning to take your kids to see Elio.

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That's a wrap for this episode. As we leave our time together, my prayer for you is that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care find yourselves, you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son.

I'll see you next time!