I went into Elevation knowing it would be bad—there’s something liberating in having your low expectations met so precisely, like watching a car accelerate off a cliff with immaculate predictability. George Nolfi’s latest exercise in post-apocalyptic hand-wringing arrives already embalmed, wheeling Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin out like two alluring mannequins about to be discarded. It is a feat to make actors this lively feel this bored; by the end, you could almost hear the cameraman nodding off.
Elevation sells you on a doozy of a premise: 95% of humankind devoured by monsters called "Reapers,” with the scraps of humanity eking out oxygen-starved lives on mountaintops the creatures apparently fear. You might brace yourself for altitude-fueled tension or primal, Goya-esque terror. Instead, the film settles for pancakes of cliché so thin the plate shines through. Will (Mackie, resignedly sturdy) needs oxygen filters for his ailing son—a script outline you’d jot between emails, not build a movie on. There are hints at emotional stakes, but the whole enterprise proceeds with the tragic inevitability of a sitcom laugh track in an empty theater.
The writing is less a screenplay than a series of false starts and blank stares. The film stirs up just enough mystery—Why the Reapers? Why 8,000 feet? Why are we watching any of this?—only to give up mid-sentence. There’s no enigma here worth savoring, just loose threads tangling in your pocket. The plot cycles through scenes that bleed from one dull gray into another, a conveyor belt of suspense-free errands and half-whispered trauma. By the hour mark, the only thing accelerating is audience apathy.
Let’s talk about Mackie and Baccarin, forced to act through a fog of indifference. Both keep their dignity, if not their pulse; their suffering is less on screen than in what we know they could have brought to a better script. Will and Nina are cut-glass silhouettes—vaguely sorrowful, deeply forgettable, and so narratively weightless that, should the Reapers have shuffled them off early, I doubt anyone would notice their exit among the film’s other disappearing prospects.
If Mackie spends most of the movie looking for oxygen, George Nolfi, the director, can’t find a single breath of inspiration. The pacing drags like a wounded animal—long stretches of dialogue so uninspired they might as well have been generated by an ill-tempered algorithm. Instead of suspense, we get the cinematic equivalent of busywork: conversations about nothing, stakes that evaporate on arrival, set pieces that punctuate the flatlining story with an occasional, indifferent shrug.
Not even the occasional flash of visual competence can mask the structural anoxia. The action, when it appears, feels as if it were choreographed by someone browsing YouTube for ideas. The thematic ambitions—familial bonds! human endurance!—fizzle into the mist, overtaken by the thundering vacuity of it all. The movie gestures toward The Last of Us or A Quiet Place, but only in the way a knockoff purse gestures toward Paris fashion: inexact, ungainly, and secretly embarrassed by the comparison.
The result is a film that doesn’t just miss its genre’s bar—it can’t even see it through the fog. Bird Box, I Am Legend, or even a middling episode of The Walking Dead will seem like Dostoevsky after this. Elevation has the scope of a student short, stretched beyond all reason, a failed mixtape of greater films reduced to awkward silence.
I watched The Adjustment Bureau and The Bourne Ultimatum—both tight, clever, nervy films—from the same director and marveled at how far a filmmaker can fall when left without a good idea, or perhaps, without a reason. The strangest trick Elevation pulls is how it manages to be overlong and undercooked at once; you leave it famished for even the crumbs of narrative satisfaction.
The only thing Elevation manages to elevate is your sense of time wasted. Save yourself the migraine; if this is the future of post-apocalyptic movies, I’d rather take my chances with the monsters under 8,000 feet. There is no altitude high enough to breathe life into this spectacularly bland catastrophe.
