Elephant review

aelst's review

The first half of the movie is rather boring. Plenty of scenes of a clean high school and its students going about their daily business. The exciting part (highschool massacre like Columbine) happens at the end of the movie, so you can relax until then.

The movie felt a bit slow, no character development, and I didn't get any message from the movie. The timelines and scenes are jumbled about, and you'll see the same scene replayed from a different angle, but this is hardly entertaining. The acting and filming is so realistic that its rather boring, but it makes its impact when the violence starts happening. There's only a couple of hints for the reasons behind the shooting - the movie doesn't really seek to explain anything, and ends right after it occurs.

The last scene with the clouds made me forget about the whole movie.

2 out of 5 stars.

ratbag's review

Expect no plot, character development or flashy CGI from this movie, as there is none. That said, I am not suggesting that Elephant is a bad film, I found it to be beautiful and dreamlike.

The film opens and closes with a time-lapse shot of rolling clouds, which reminded me of David Attenborough's documentaries, showing desert flowers bloom and die, seasons come and go. Elephant had a voyeuristic, documentary feel to it, as the camera follows each student in the film, each in a single shot, leading to the climatic event near the end, where they encounter the gun-totting teens.

The school shown in Elephant is a like a microcosm of our society -- you have your popular, athletic students, your geeks, arts students, jocks, bitchy girls, with some seemingly normal, but somehow twisted people, all forced together in the small confines of a school. Gus Van Sant offers no explanation to the killers' actions; rather, he shows us the complex world of teenagers, their fears (wearing short skirts for Phys. Ed.), their concerns (dieting), their social structure, their sexuality, etc.