Elephant
Starring: Alex Frost, Elias McConnellDirector: Gus Van Sant
Studio: Warner Home Video
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Format: Color, Widescreen
Picture: Pan & Scan
Audio: DTS 5.1, DTS 5.1
DVD Release: May 4th 2004
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DVD Review
Elephant, the elegant and unsettling movie from Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting), depicts students at a high school before and during a harrowing, Columbine-style shooting. The movie follows one young boy who takes over the wheel from his drunken dad while returning from lunch, then loops back in time and follows another student who crosses paths with the first, then loops back and follows another--all captured in long, unedited tracking shots that are serene and unhurried, even when two boys in camouflage gear, carrying heavy bags, arrive at the school and begin shooting. Elephant doesn't attempt to explain their behavior; it simply places the audience back in the brief yet interminable window of adolescence, when life is trivial and painfully important at the same time. Your reaction to Elephant will depend as much on your life experiences as anything in the movie itself. --Bret Fetzer
User Reviews
Lackluster look at a worthy subject - Rating: 2/5
I was in 7th Grade when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a rampage in their Colorado High School. I remember my heavy-set science teacher reduced to tears, and I remember the crude wooden gun I carved in Industrial Arts being taken away from me out of concern that it might lead to me killing people (telling them my father was a hunter did not help matters). The Columbine Event was a significant part of my life, and there is a film to be made about it. However, "Elephant" is not it.
My primary complaint about Elephant is that it was so mundane. Oh I do not mean that I wanted an explosion every five minutes, I mean I wanted dialogue and characterization. I assumed the approach the director was going to take was a build-up of characters we (the audience) would care about, and then a shocking climax. Instead I got stereotypes worse than in "Scarecrow Gone Wild: He's the Death of the Party." We have a nerdy girl who works at the library, three attractive girls who throw up their lunch, two killers who have repressed homosexual tendencies and watch shows on the Nazis, a jock and his new attractive girlfriend, etc. I hate calling a movie boring--it's so ignorant--but I was hard-pressed to get involved in this film. There were no characters I liked, as a matter of fact there weren't any characters at all. Just a few cariactures and cardboard cutouts.
The style of direction was also grating on the nerves and the eyes. While a long-take can be great (i.e. Goodfellas) on its own, watching long-take after long-take was exceptionally annoying. It got so bad that I started looking forward to cuts, which heretofore I took for granted. Van Zant seems to be in love with every shot, being pretentiously artsy for the sake of doing so, and it was exceptionally irritating. Further, no one seemed to care at all when two crazed killers were running amuck with deadly weaponry. If someone could explain the actions of the black guy at the end (Benny?), you have my email. Most-appreciated.
Some people have critisized the film for not offering a reason for such senseless violence, and while I understand their complaints, I have a more pressing one: If the writer/director could please craft an actual involving story, then I'll worry about the "why." *1/2 out of ****
Gus Van Sant Fails Me Once Again WIth Elephant - Rating: 1/5
Elephant is a terrible movie taking on one of the most terrifying crimes of our time. Even though this movie is loosely based on the Columbine Shootings. It should be called Kids with no sense of purpose except "long hall walking camera shots" which really serve as no sense of direction or narration. I was completely disturbed by the gay shower sequence. To me this is another chance for Gus to exploit homosexuality , just as he did in The Last Days which is another failure for Gus as a director. To me these two movies are terribly offensive and not to prove a point either, just for the purposbee of adding some dramatic effect to two movies that are terribly directed. I feel he is exploting two terribly disturbed children in Elephant. He does not really give us any sense of reasoning behind the shootings . He shows a young watching Adolph Hitler films looking completely taken with with the whole Nazi life style and then in the next scene the same young man is in the shower waiting to have sex with the other co conspiritor of the shootings who he ultimately ends up shooting himself. Gus must have a complete misunderstanding of Nazi beliefs. Adolph Hitler was openly against homosexulity. Does Gus have a problem with Homosexuality. Does Gus believe all Homosexuals are Gun weilding young handsome men who can't wait to get off with each other then run out to shoot up their school? What was the purpose of this film? The ending is just as terrible as every "long hall walking " sequence. I was completely offended by this film and not in a good way. Not in a way that would make me want to learn more, or try and seek out the message of this film, which I believe this film has none. It was just a long walk to nothing. This is probably one of the worst films I have ever seen. I can't get back the hour and a half of my life I wasted on watching this film.
A Completely Empty Experience - Rating: 1/5
ELEPHANT is one of those films where you actually feel like you know even less about Columbine or the film's story after watching it than you did before you saw it.
At first, it plays like a Stanley Kubrick take on a school massacre with endless tracking shots following the students as they walk through their boring lives. What dialogue is spoken is banal and poorly-improvised. The film avoids easy choices...but it also refuses to make many choices at all, instead just hinting at things like plot and character development.
And the addition of a gay shower scene--something added by Van Sant that wasn't part of Columbine--makes me wonder what ELEPHANT was really trying to say. (All the gay touches Van Sant poured into his pointless refilming of PSYCHO makes me wonder, along with making the killers in ELEPHANT gay, if there is some serious self-loathing going on here).
From what little we're given, we have to fill in the blanks with these killers, trying to find clues of bullying and isolation and rage...and then the shower scene appears. Was this movie trying to say ANYTHING?
By the end, I was only curious to see how all the editing of the threads would come together.
Because the viewer wasn't going to learn or experience anything else from this movie.
"Elephant" bothered me. - Rating: 2/5
As much as I appreciated Van Sant's film about how lives intertwine, every student has a story, and you never really know the lives of other people unless you live them, "Elephant" bothered me. Having studied Columbine extensively for a term paper, the film was too similar to the events at Columbine to be a coincidence and not factual enough to be accurate.
An unrelated title to a relatively-dull movie - Rating: 3/5
- REVIEW
1999 was a terrible year for Colorado. A small high school named Columbine was forever defaced by two random outcasts packing heat. It was a massacre beyond belief, with the outcasts committed the deaths of over 10 people, students and teachers alike. The criminals were soon wasted by the SWAT and everything was apprehended, but no one, especially the students, can ever forget the bloodshed that flowed upon the floors of Columbine. So how is it possible for first-time director Gus Van Sant to make the most tragic shooting in the school system look so incredibly boring?
The badly-titled "Elephant" follows that morbid event, as you all know. Instead of following how the tragedy came to be at the start like most based-on-true-events movie, this movie give different perspectives during the event. About 9 students I think, the geeks, jocks, prissies, and the ones responible for the event, gives their own separate point-of-view (except for the 3 girls that share only one) of what's happening in front of them. Sometimes, some of these characters interject when they cross paths to one's POV. Pratically, it's a typical nothing's-happening day for these kids...except when the shooting starts. Each of these characters have their own first name, and interestingly enough, their first names are similar to their real names.
I like the characters in story because they all look so convincingly real, the kind of students you would normally see in school. This would have been a remarkable context to see these characters lived their lives right where the massacre, but as I find out, the only conclusive purpose for these kids to either die by the hands of the two outcasts or live and walk away with nothing. This make caring for the characters highly irrelevant, even if it's intentional by the director's vision. I DO have a complaint about one of the kids, who goes by Benny, who's got to be the dumbest black kid on earth who just blindingly walks towards his demise instead of hastenly avoiding it. If he's based on a real murdered victim, I rather not go forward to disrespect the deceased.
Mr. Van Sant has a unique direction in this film, which is also his most flawed. He uses cinematography to follow the character's perspective no matter he or she goes, with very little scene change and editing involved (think of this as that video from Xzibit, "What you see is what you get"). This makes the film's scenery more subtle and natural. Van Sant also has a habit of leaving the camera fixed on one view to give it some kind of nonchalant view. These are also the problems with this film because they were too many of these moments and they were WAY too long and subtle.
The following-the-characters direction puts the word "arbitrary" on a high level, as I spend most of time watching characters being invisibly followed as they do mostly boring activities. Adding to the drowsiness is the lengthy fixed camera scenes, which are either artistic expressive or incredibly lazy on the director's part; who actually wants to spend half a minute looking at the sky? Even at 80 minutes, this movie has more unnecessary filler than the fourth season of InuYasha (anime fan, that I am). One last complaint, what does the title "Elephant" have to do with the actual event? Does it mean that big things can whimper at the sight of death? What kind of subjective context is on Van Sant's easy-going mind when he came up with the title?
By the time the shooting actually happens, and it's kinda graphic, I was too exhausted to feel devastated about it. In my experience watching this film, it felt like being eight years old and watching those old educational videos in Science class; slow and it feels like work. If the director wants to envision a tragic nilch tale of Columbine, he should think less "art" and more "narrative." "Elephant" is a intriguing film focusing on the nature side of the tragedy, so I give it the benefit of the doubt. It's worth seeing it once just to get it out of the way, but as flawed as it is, there's no incentive to give it a second viewing.
This is Del Keyes, saying "zzzzZZZZZ...goths shooting jocks...ZZZZzzzz"
