ELEVATION - Mark Reviews Movies

Elevation, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2024

Calling the story and characters of Elevation barebones doesn't quite describe how little there is to this material. The plot follows a small group of survivors, following the worldwide emergence of subterranean monsters, and their efforts both to retrieve medical supplies and to find a way to finally kill the beasts. Most of this ends up being a lengthy hike across the mountainous terrain of Colorado, as the characters argue about the same things again and again, while also being just as confounded as we are about the nature of the creatures hunting them.

That director George Nolfi somehow convinced a couple of decent and recognizable actors, namely Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin, to star in this low-budget science-fiction thriller might be its biggest mystery, though. It's not as if this offers them much to do that they couldn't be doing in a more prominent project. They run and shoot and spout off lots of expositional dialogue in between the few bits of action here. Considering that both of them gained some level of fame by more or less doing exactly that in some big-budget superhero movies, what was the draw to this thinly devised replica of a Hollywood actioner?

It surely wasn't the characters. Mackie plays Will, who now lives in a small community of other survivors with his young son Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.). Three years prior, the world was besieged by monsters that emerged from sinkholes, and later on, we learn that the initial attack wiped out 95% of the entire population of the globe. With those numbers, it almost seems like pure, dumb luck that any of these characters survived.

As we get to know them and their plans, that seems even more likely. Hunter has an unspecified breathing condition, which requires him to use a machine while he sleeps. When the filters of the device run out, Will decides he must travel from the safety of the commune to Boulder, where surely the hospital there will have plenty of filters just lying around to be taken.

It would be simple enough, except for the monsters and their very particular limitation. They do not go higher than 8,000 feet. Why is that? Well, that's a great question that's repeatedly asked by various characters here and never answered. Presumably, that's because screenwriters John Glenn, Jacob Roman, and Kenny Ryan decided that was a unique gimmick among the multiple other monster restrictions we've seen over the decades, and they simply left the thinking at that.

To get to the city, Will will have to travel below that elevation, of course, putting him in danger of being attacked by the monsters. They have another gimmick, by the way, which is that they're covered in tough scales that are resistant to bullets and even explosions. There's no way to kill one that anyone has discovered, although Nina (Morena Baccarin), who also somehow survived the initial onslaught (despite being right at the epicenter of one of the sinkholes, apparently), had been doing experiments to try to find a way to defeat them.

She wouldn't have been doing this research in her lab in the middle of the city before the invasion, obviously, so did the monsters just leave the laboratory alone long enough for her to somehow get pieces of their scales (quite the feat, considering they're indestructible), test some hypotheses, and get really close to an answer before she finally needed to flee to safety? The screenwriters might have thought we'd be so curious about the creatures that we wouldn't notice the script's assorted other inconsistencies.

Anyway, Nina joins Will on his trek, along with his friend Katie (Maddie Hasson). They walk and debate, since Nina took Will's wife on a fatal expedition to return to the lab a year prior, before hiking and bickering some more. Occasionally, one of the monsters, dubbed "Reapers," appears, leading them to run, hide, take the time to ride a ski lift, and shoot bullets and grenades at the creature. They already know weapons are useless against the Reapers, but they keep firing away anyway, even after repeatedly proving that weapons are useless against them.

It's all so repetitive, especially since Nolfi puts the budget limitations of the movie on full display by how infrequently the digital monsters actually turn up in the story (There's a lot of shots of actors looking in the direction of one off-camera). Sure, a single Reaper is there when absolutely necessary in Elevation, and that's pretty much a summation of the sense the movie exudes. It does the absolute, bare minimum and nothing more.

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