Mystic Slippers
Jul 2002
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 Review: Elephant (2003)
Name: Elephant
Director: Gus Van Sant
Year: 2003
Official Site: www.elephantmovie.com
Coming from director Gus Van Sant, is the small movie and big hit at the festival's, Elephant. Starring a bunch of pretty-much unknown child actors, Elephant is a movie loosely based on the Colombine shootings a few years ago.
The movie essentially begins introducing a select bunch of students and follows them round the school halls as they go about their business during the school day. Van Sant takes the opportunity to introduce the characters, showing you what they like doing and how each of them is so diverse in what they do and how they live. Van Sant's directon is for the most part pretty flawless as the camera follows one student then trails off to meet another student. One flaw with this is that these sequences are very much drawn out longer than they should be. If you weigh up the running time against the amount of time spent aimlessly following the student around school walking down a hallway, i would say about 75% of the movie is spent doing this. It's fresh and exciting direction at first, but quickly becomes boring.
The main problem i have with Elephant, is that NOTHING HAPPENS. Your essentially waiting for the build up where the school is attacked, and well, it's all over in about 10 minutes. The rest of the movie is pure build up following uninterseting characters around school you neither get to know, nor care about. Albeit the attack on the school at the end is very surreal yet frightening, it's carried out in an almost flippant way. Besides the odd yell and scream, the students seem to take the whole thing in their stride. It's like they're saying "oh wow, he just got shot, let's go walk around a while and see who's responsible" instead of letting their emotions run wild and screaming and fleeing in terror. The violence is carried out expertly, but is ruined by the total laissez-faire attitude by the students. Even the ending i found ridiculous and, dare i say it, boring.
Elephant does have it's plus points though. I loved the use of the camera, the direction was beautiful. I also liked the way one scene would be revisited several times as in one scene, maybe 3 focus characters are in the picture, so Van Sant takes you back to follow each students activities from one scene. Again though it does get taken to far and does get dull. I also liked the use of surreal audio and sound effects, although again, sometimes this was overused.
In essence, this movie had potential which i feel was wasted. It could have been so much more, but in the end i felt failed pretty dismally. Elephant is a brave movie, but unfortunately is neither very interesting nor very good.
A great shame as i was expecting more. Worth a watch, but don't get too excited it ain't that good.
FINAL SCORE: 4/10
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01-07-2004 12:59 AM
