Director – George Nolfi, Screenplay – John Glenn, Jacob Roman & Kenny Ryan, Producers – Alex Black, Brad Fuller, John Glenn, Anthony Mackie, George Nolfi, Natalie Sellers, Joel Viertel & Jeremy Kipp Walker, Photography – Shelly Johnson, Music – H. Scott Salinas, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nathan McGuinness, Visual Effects/Animation – Digital Domain (Supervisor – Piotr Karwas), Visual Effects – AB Studios (Supervisor – Kaustubh Ahtavale), Crafty Apes (Supervisors – Marc Smith & Christian Wood), DVFX, Firestorm VFX & King’s Ransom Media (Supervisor – Nicolaus Waetjen), Special Effects Supervisors – David R. Fletcher & Jim Milligan, Practical Creature Effects – Creative Character Engineering, Production Design – Bill Boes. Production Company – Lyrical Media/Grinder Monkey/John Glenn Entertainment/Story Ink.
Cast
Anthony Mackie (Will), Morena Baccarin (Nina Richmond), Maddie Hasson (Katie), Danny Boyd Jr. (Hunter)
Plot
It is three years after creatures known as the Reapers have emerged from below ground, hunting and killing all humans. The Reapers will not go above eight thousand feet. Will is part of a small community of survivors who have relocated at Lost Gulch Reach in the Colorado mountains. However, Will has run of out the masks he needs for his son Hunter’s asthma. Will decides the only hope is a venture down to get more supplies from the hospital in Boulder. Nina, a former scientist, says it is a suicide mission. Will counters that he knows the mines in the mountains and there are only two points where these go below eight thousand feet for several hundred yards. Joined by Katie and Nina, he sets out. This becomes a perilous journey beset by the creatures that track them by the carbon dioxide they breathe out.
Elevation was the fourth film as director for George Nolfi. Nolfi started as a screenwriter with scripts for the likes of Timeline (2003), Ocean’s Twelve (2004), The Sentinel (2006), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Spectral (2016). He made his directorial debut with The Adjustment Bureau (2011) and went on to create/produce the tv series Allegiance (2015), and then direct the Bruce Lee biopic Birth of the Dragon (2016) and the true-life The Banker (2020)
At the outset, Elevation looks as though it has been conceived as a copy of A Quiet Place (2018). Where A Quiet Place had aliens that hunted anybody who made the slightest sound, this has aliens that hunt people who breathe CO2 and kill anything below an elevation of eight thousand feet. (The bit that gets me is that the Reapers attack those that breathe CO2 and then we see herds of horses and cattle spared. Cattle in particular are some of the biggest CO2 polluters on the planet and are in fact seen as one of the most substantial contributors to Global Warming).
Like George Nolfi’s Spectral, Elevation has a very scientifically dubious premise but once we become into the thick of it, the script plays the premise through to its logical conclusions and derives a good deal of tension from there. You cannot deny that the film starts to gain a hold on you once the expedition sets out. There are some seat-edge scenes with Anthony Mackie, Morena Baccarin and Maddie Hasson running through the open to get to the ski lift and then the Reapers starting to tear the cable down as the lift makes its way up. Equally effective are the scenes where they must venture through the mines, some of which descend below the 8000 feet threshold.
(l to r) Morena Baccarin, Maggie Maddie Hasson (back to camera) and Anthony Mackie set out on their quest
Symptomatic of the way that the film has been conceived in terms of its premise and not its supporting logic is when Anthony Mackie asks scientist Morena Baccarin the quite reasonable question “Why eight thousand feet?” which receives a shrug “I have no idea.” In the same way that the A Quiet Place sequels started to stretch the original premise thin when they were required to come up with an explanation for the set-up, Elevation similarly arrives at [PLOT SPOILERS] the contrivation of a magic bullet that causes the Reapers to disintegrate into puffs of dust. Right at the end, we get an explanation about of this all being the prelude to an alien invasion (no doubt laying groundwork for a potential sequel).
Anthony Mackie has proven himself quite a reasonable actor when he is out of the shadow of The MCU. Here he is solid, sympathetic and in charge. I am not entirely sure I buy Morena Baccarin playing the tough, hard-bitten, even harder-drinking scientist part that would mandatorily be played by Sigourney Weaver in any other film, but she acquits herself capably once required to play the terse sharp-tongued part.
