Elevation: Emotional But Shallow

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Elevation is that it actually contained much of what it needed to be an excellent survivalist drama. Will isn't a terribly noteworthy main character, but Anthony Mackie plays him with utmost sincerity. The world he and other survivors like him inhabit is portrayed gracefully with a subtle, Wild West-esque flair. It seemed early on as though this movie had all the right ingredients to be genuinely and believably soulful. And so I'm a little surprised to have gotten to the end of it, only to find myself asking what went wrong, and where?

Three years after mysterious and extremely deadly predators known as Reapers emerged from the ground with an unquenchable thirst for human blood, survivors have, on many levels, adapted to their new normal. After discovering that the Reapers can't ascend above 8,000 feet, bands of survivors quickly migrated to the mountains of America to start over, Will and his son Hunter among them. However, Hunter has a rare and debilitating lung disease that makes life even more challenging for him than most. When his oxygen machine runs out of filters, Will, being the good single father he is, makes an old-fashioned post-apocalyptic supply run into the dangerous world below for the sake of his son. It's a familiar yet promising enough premise, but even though Elevation has all the makings of a good movie, it consistently confuses emotional forcefulness for emotional depth; it promises an ocean, but proves to be little more than a puddle.

Elevation is a simple movie, and that's not an inherently bad thing. Its editing is thoughtfully minimal, its mind set on the simple message of a father's love for his child. Granted, it's a movie that did seem targeted to my demographic, and so its message will probably resonate more with people like me - young men who are either fathers or hoping to be one day - than it will with anyone else. The production design and sound elements in this movie are solid and no-nonsense, the former being reminiscent of HBO's The Last of Us in its eye-catching, grounded simplicity. The soundtrack of the movie, though a bit unambitiously droning, is also well-suited to its quiet sobriety.

The direction of Elevation is also another bright spot amidst a movie that can be something of a dull, gray patch. It's nothing we haven't seen before, little more than an admittedly interesting collage of other, better movies. Still, said direction is effective and even a little surprising for a movie about mysterious killer creatures, finding a minimalism that gives it more dimensions than it realistically deserved to have. Nevertheless, its direction is in the service of problematic concepts. On the level of the monsters that justify its story's very existence, Elevation falters under the weight of mediocre computer graphics that really take you out of the experience. Its natural scenery is as pretty as a painting, but this movie would have been better off using more techniques than it actually did to hide its menacing but under-animated antagonists.

It's hard to deny, even if it could have been more original, that the premise of Elevation was promising. Its execution is where the problems begin to pile up. This movie all but abandons its own story after the initial crisis of Hunter's dwindling oxygen supply is established, and though the constant character drama generates sparks of intrigue, emotion without substance is not enough to sustain a movie for even an hour and a half. This one falls into a somber, quiet aimlessness that exposes the bittersweet memories of its characters without ever doing anything particularly useful with them. And even if Will is a solid-enough main protagonist, Nina and Katie make for an unbearably irritating supporting cast between their constant bickering and bothersome one-dimensionality.

On a fundamental level, movies are vessels that deliver empathy to the audience, and I was under the impression that Elevation knew this without ever truly understanding what that actually means. It turns surprisingly clinical with enough time, especially given its strong emotional offset. This movie had all the ingredients it needed to be deep and meaningful, but it doesn't know what to do with them. The filmmakers set out to make an emotionally complex and human-centric drama, and I don't believe they succeeded. The sentiment is plentiful here, but Elevation doesn't know how to dig below surface-level tear-jerking, and I was very bothered by the fact that it often mistook raw emotion for emotional complexity; it's trying to be simple, but shallowness is the close, careless, and intrusive parasitic cousin of simplicity, and it digs its claws into this movie. Deep.

My impression is that most likely won't spot the flaws in this admittedly restrained and sometimes emotional movie unless they're trained to, and an 80% audience score seems to confirm this. Elevation is a solid-enough popcorn flick that will work for you if you don't think about it too much, and this fact hurts a little bit because of its evident desire to be more. But between an unoriginal premise and a vague story that's something like the illegitimate child of A Quiet Place and The Last of Us, anyone with either any formal training in film analysis or a long record of watched movies is probably better off looking elsewhere. Elevation brings nothing new to the table and offers no new ideas, character archetypes, or story developments. The things about it that do work often served only to remind me that there was a good movie in here somewhere, a good movie that could have been were it not for the insistent copycatting we got instead.

Elevation - 5/10

Proverbs 3:11-12