It’s natural for Hollywood to want to copy a successful concept wholesale in order to capitalise on a bit of money, but do they have to always be so obvious about it? I only ask because I’ve just finished watching Elevation, a dystopian sci-fi survival thriller that will seem awfully familiar to anyone who has Sat themselves in front of any one of the three A Quiet Place movies that existed when it was released. That’s right, it’s another humanity in peril from monster with weird quirks movie, and while the film (helmed by The Adjustment Bureau’s George Nolfi) is fairly slick, the fact that it barely has an original bone in its gnarly, tentacled, bulletproof body ends up being something that becomes fairly hard to ignore.
However, with Anthony Mackie in the lead and Monica Baccarin in support, can the movie possibly manage to drag itself over the line that divides the high from the low?
It seems that for the last three years, mankind has plummeted into the dystopia toilet faster than you can say invasion. The issue is that all of a sudden, humans found themselves beseiged by burly monsters – or Reapers – that had risen from a subterranean slumber and started slaughtering every fleshy biped in sight. However, small communities of people managed to survive once they discovered that the beasts, for whatever reason, can’t (or won’t) ascend to 8,000 feet above sea level. It’s in one of these communities in Colorado that we find Will, a single father whose wife was killed after a mission to try and find a weakness to help take out the Reapers went horribly wrong. Since then, all he’s done is try and keep his sickly son, Hunter, safe which is proving to get more difficult with every passing day as he has a lung disease that requires a machine to help him breathe through the tough spots.
However, the oxygen filters required to keep the machine working are running out and at some point, Will is going to have to cross the elevation line in order to make it to a nearby hospital to get what he needs. However, no one need take a dangerous, possibly suicidal, mission alone and as Will heads out to prolong the life of his boy, he’s flanked by his wife’s best friend, Katie and Nina, a scientist who is convinced she can figure out how to kill the Reapers if she can just get to her old lab. However, while tension is unsurprisingly thick in the air (murderous underground monsters, remember?), adding an extra layer of awkwardness is the fact that it was Nina’s previous mission that got Will’s wife, Tara, killed in the first place, which doesn’t exactly bode well for morale.
However, when an unforseen issue cause the trio to head below the safety height required to avoid the Reapers, disaster strikes that could possibly spell doom for mankind and certainly mean a wheezing death for Hunter.
While Elevation certainly isn’t unwatchable, there’s a deep feeling that thanks to its incredibly overfamiliar premise and it’s inferior effects work, the result feels more like the Syfy channel put more money than usual into making one of its mockbusters and managed to secure actual stars. The thing is, it’s bad enough that we’re three movies deep into the A Quiet Place franchise, but what makes matters exponentially worse is that 2024 not only saw the release of the Quiet Place prequel, Day One, but it also saw the incredibly similar Arcadian scamper onto screens that also dealt out familiar thrills with similarly eccentrically designed creatures. However, even if it wasn’t following up two very similar movies within the same year, Elevation has quite the uphill battle to win if anyone is going to tale it seriously.
Sadly, it kind of doesn’t, thanks to a derivative script and characters who stubbornly refuse to sound even remotely like real people and deliver stark, weirdly exposition-filled dialogue that sounds like it should be encased in a comic book speech bubble. As a result, it’s virtually impossible not to endlessly (and unfavourably) compare it to the movies it’s ripping off for every second it’s playing. The whole family thing is rehashed thanks to Anthony Mackie’s character fretting about the fact that his young son has lungs that are about effective as pound shop balloons (you know, the ones that have a 50% chance of popping the second you put about two breaths into it), but while A Quiet Place based it’s entirely identity around the family dynamic, Elevation, just makes its sickly child a maguffin to be saved by his panicked dad. As a result, the film often feels little more than a mission you’d play in a survival game such as Silent Hill or The Last Of Us and feels even less personal as a result – especially considering that the characters are not much more than stock players in this sort of adventure.
If we shift our focus over to the monsters, we find a similar lack of focus. While the beasts from A Quiet Place have that iconic quirk of trading in sight for a skull that’s essentially a giant bulletproof eardrum with teeth and the chattering freaks from Arcadian are memorable for not following any logical physical behavior whatsoever (stretchy limbs, rapidly clacking jaws, ability to combine to make a ball), the Elevation monsters are fairly standard, forgettable things that not only have an incredibly overused name (they seriously couldn’t come up with anything more original than reapers?) but they mostly look like the creatures from The Great Wall mated with the creatures from The Tomorrow War and then had thicc babies. But aside from the odd glowing tendril, there’s nothing really here to distinguish the Reapers from any other monster seen over the last few years. Adding to tbe issue that the basic setup is hardly inspiring, is that it often stumbles into plotholes far bigger than the sinkholes the Reapers have emerged from. For example, it’s never actually explained why the Reapers can’t go above 8,000 feet despite it being a major plotpoint and when we get the revelation of what the creatures actually are and why they’re so hard to kill, the whys and wherefores are foolishly left unanswered with the threat of a sequel that most likely won’t ever see the light of day.
With all this being said, Elevation is still a fairly painless way to waste 90 minutes and some of the setpieces, despite featuring some noticably iffy green screen shot here and there, are actually pretty fun. A set to on a ski lift is fairly competent, as is a section set down in a mine, but I’ve got a feeling that those wanting more airtight stories might not appreciate the video game style plotting that literally has characters pick up working weapon upgrades clean off the ground and twists that involve unpassable doors.
The least of the many Quiet Place style entries that surfaced in 2024, I guess those who can’t get enough of the basic set up of John Krasinski’s breakout hit will take to this happily while we patiently wait for Part 3, but anyone hoping for something more unique will find Elevation existing at a much lower level.
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