Elemental
Okay, so ostensibly this is a movie about the immigrant experience in New York City. This theme is about as subtle as a very unsubtle thing, which isn't bad! Subtle themes fly over the heads of most audiences, and this is a story worth telling clearly. It's based on the director Peter Sohn's experience as the son of Korean immigrants in the 1970s. Promising idea, right?
Well Elemental starts off on the right foot. It constructs a beautiful and fantastical place called "Element City" that manages to be a fine depiction of New York City. It's a bustling city with a diverse and growing immigrant population. Everyone's just trying to carve out a happy life for themselves in a society that is structurally stacked against them.
The main character— Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis)— and her family own a convenience store which mirrors Sohn's own childhood in the Bronx. The Lumens have to work long hours, money is tight, and they have to deal with vandalism and poorly maintained infrastructure with seemingly no support from the local government or community.
That poorly maintained infrastructure is exactly how the shoehorned romance plot begins because a water person named Wade (Mamoudou Athie) floods into the basement of their convenience store. Like the start of all good romance plots, the characters apologize after bumping into each other, clean up the mess, and the spark of romance becomes a flame of passion (heh).
Just kidding, that's not what happened at all! Wade is a city inspector who does nothing to clean up the mess. Instead, he plans to report the broken plumbing to the city while being fully aware this would result in Ember's family store being shut down and them losing their livlihood. All of this over some plumbing that was apparently overloaded due to a leak in the canal that the city maintains. Nothing's dreamier than a guy who's willing to destroy your family over a technicality I guess.
Trying to get Wade's boss, Gale (Wendi McLendon-Covey) to forgive the unfair citation Wade wrote in the first place is the main driver of the rest of the plot. Gale agrees to forgive the citation in exchange for finding the source of a leak in the canal. This was Wade's job to begin with, but now Ember is essentially being blackmailed to help out too. Gale even tells them to hire a crew to fix the leak! What kind of a city is this?
To me, the only rational explanation is that this is a depiction of systematic racism. It evokes things like "broken windows policing", the Flint water crisis, the injustice of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, or any other case of racial hierarchies being systematically enforced.
And that's exactly what's happening in Element City. The city is literally built to be hostile to fire people, such as the elevated subway that sends deadly splashes of water down to the streets where Ember does deliveries. At some point, Ember visits Wade's family, which lives in the richer part of town in a giant skyscraper surrounded by deadly water features, showcasing the wealth disparity in the city. So it's no wonder that a city built and run entirely by non-fire people would subject the community of fire people to unsafe living conditions and refuse to do anything about it.
Now we're at a crossroads in the plot. Will the movie maturely engage with its own depiction of racism? The answer is no. I'm not expecting the characters to rise up and single-handedly "solve" racism, but to totally brush off the situation they're in at every turn feels like the writers are normalizing it.
Ember and Wade did find and fix the leak in the canal using sand melted into glass. Gale inspects the (clearly fragile) fix and deems it safe. But of course, it breaks, massively flooding the area where most of the fire people live.
In real life, floods of that size are generally deadly, so I can't imagine all of the fire people survived even though there were no on-screen deaths. So Gale's incompetence lead to the likely deaths of many people and the destruction of their homes, but suffers no consequences and doesn't even appear in the film after inspecting the fix. Also in real life, when marginalized groups experience hardship, sometimes they come together as a community in beautiful ways, just like what happened in the Bronx in the 70s. Grassroots groups organized to keep city services running when "the area’s elected officials... were mostly corrupt and disinterested in helping their constituents".
No similar grassroots organizing happened in Elemental, which I feel like is a pretty glaring omission. Seeing that preventable disaster happen and having the focus suddenly shift to the Ember-Wade romance plot just felt so unsatisfying. It really broke the spell and made me realize I was just sitting in a theater consuming a piece of mass media that has nothing revolutionary to say, despite teeing it up very well. Revolutionary things and big box office numbers don't mix, and Elemental didn't have either.