Bug Hunt Movies Are A Dime A Dozen, Case File No. 4,553: Elevation (now streaming on Max). There is near nothing distinctive about this movie, starring MCU guy Anthony Mackie and recently recruited MCU lady Morena Baccarin (the Deadpools) as survivors of an all-out assault on humanity by ugly nasty CGI thingamajigs. It’s a survivalist sci-fi thriller. George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau) directs. The Rocky Mountains are the backdrop. Nothing about it should surprise anyone. And my hope that repeatedly honing the same formula makes it sharper went unfounded with this one – here’s why.
The Gist: Three years ago, insectoid monsters the size of bucking broncos emerged from a sinkhole and slaughtered 95 percent of the human population. They’re dubbed “reapers.” They’re nasty. They’re bulletproof. They look like ankylosaurs that mated with Cybertrucks. They can smell the carbon dioxide people exhale with tentacle-like antennae. And they won’t venture higher than an elevation of 8,000 feet. So the survivors have painted lines on the ground in Rocky-Mountain-high territory, camping out, hunting for food, scraping by in small thin-air communities. Frequent subtitles give us place names with their altitude beneath it, so we know whether to be tense or relaxed as we watch scenes play out in various locations. Why will the creatures not venture past 8,000 feet? Nobody knows, possibly not even the screenwriters.
So here we are in Lost Gulch Refuge, where Will (Mackie) lives with his eight-year-old son Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.). Their wife/mother died a while back. They’re close pals with Katie (Maddie Hasson). And their nextdoor neighbor, Nina (Baccarin) is a physicist who drinks and bakes bullets in her toaster oven and drinks and tests the bullets and drinks some more, not a great combination of behaviors. Hunter’s the only kid around here, and he takes a risk by crossing the white line so he can point his binoculars at another settlement, which tells us he feels isolated and sad. Of course a reaper sniffs him out and of course he barely makes it past the line and of course he lives to get his heinie chewed by his dad. Their community is self-sufficient, almost. Hunter is asthmatic, and needs filters for his breathing machine, of a type you can’t find above 8,000 feet, of course.
And thus the plot gets a-grindin’. Will grabs a backpack and an M-16 for a trek to Boulder, where he can hopefully find some filters at an abandoned hospital. Nina agrees to join him so she can stop by her former laboratory – if she can get the right materials, she can test her hypothesis that coating bullets with a certain alloy, it’ll make the reapers explode. Her drunken bullet-baking was research, see. Katie catches wind of their quest and not-without-mes her way into the party. Will’s idea is to take a shortcut through an old underground mine. Foolproof plan. What could possibly go wrong?
During the trek, Katie and Nina squabble in a just-shut-up-and-kiss-already kind of way: “We’re gonna die out there,” the self-loathing cynical fatalist Nina quips, “but you’re first.” Not quite, though – they come across abandoned military humvees and find a grenade launcher, which Katie knows how to use. How? “I’m from Texas,” she explains. Oh, OK! Nina also has a fancy watch she designed to detect the reapers, and from what I can tell, it alerts the user that one’s coming about a millisecond before you hear one rampaging through the brush, making clicky, metallic growling noises that echo through the valley and emitting a bright red light that you can see from the Moon. Nina’s also helpful because everything she says explains things about the movie concept, e.g., “Predators kill to eat. Reapers kill to kill.” If any joy is to be had around here, it will be killed by Nina. But will she figure out how to kill the reapers that kill just to kill? NO SPOILERS, mac.
\What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The 8,000-feet thing is the stupidest Nonsense Monster Rule since A Quiet Place. The creatures come from a long line of tentacled whatevers from films such as Starship Troopers, The Matrix sequels and Edge of Tomorrow. The movie also stirs in some Aliens and Predatorisms, and one scene rips off Spielberg’s War of the Worlds with impressive shamelessness.
Performance Worth Watching: Would you rather watch Baccarin spew, by turns, mouthfuls of cliches and exposition, or Mackie dutifully grit his teeth through a dishearteningly generic role? Coin flip!
Memorable Dialogue: One of the groaniest Baccarin cliches: “We’re gonna have to fight them eventually, Will. Might as well be today.”
Sex and Skin: Nada.
Our Take: A wise old friend of mine once asserted that any movie with a character who shouts GO GO GO GO GO during an action sequence is automatically lousy. I don’t wholly agree with that – the movie faces an uphill climb post-GO GO GO GO GO, but with a little work it can overcome the error of having an imperiled character shout a series of syllables with no discernible function but to generate an artificial sense of tension. It’s annoying, and there are times when we’re subject to a grating GO GO GO GO GO that I want the movie to GO GO GO GO GO straight to Hell.
I digress, slightly. My friend was right in this case: Elevation is lousy. Professional, workmanlike, slick and tonally and visually consistent, but still lousy. Nolfi can’t overcome the dullness of a screenplay – by John Glenn, Jacob Roman and Kenny Ryan – that plays like a minimalist aggregation of a dozen other creature-feature post-apocalyptic action-thriller sci-fi movies. How three writers came up with a script that feels like a first draft is as big a mystery as the 8,000-feet thing, and I was shocked to never learn the exact logistical reason for this contrivance, because this is the type of movie that doesn’t draw us in with its air of mystery, unsolvable or otherwise, but exists to explain things in as plain and boring a fashion as possible. It explains everything else plainly, but leaves us hanging, dissatisfied. And somewhat flabbergasted by the sequel-tease during the end credits.
Such confidence is hardly justified considering how dully competent the film is. Surprises in the movie are more scarce than Hunter’s asthma filters. The subtext is barren. The action is reasonably well-executed, but unmemorable – a set piece on a ski lift has potential but is more silly than exciting, and beyond that, we’re subject to a lot of running from CGI monsters through mine tunnels lined with spraypainted foam passing as rock. Will and Nina argue about the value of truly living versus merely surviving, and that’s as deep as the movie gets. And for a movie that plays out in such a lovely rugged landscape, everything else about it is flatter than a tortilla under tank treads.
Our Call: Elevation never, well, elevates. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.