Starring Anthony Mackie, Morena Baccarin

Directed by George Nolfi

Streaming on Prime Video

To get vital meds for his sick son, Will has to venture below 8000 feet where monsters have wiped out most of humanity.

There’s a reason George Nolfi’s post-apocalyptic monster yarn has gone straight to Amazon Prime in the UK and not troubled movie theatres, despite starring Anthony Mackie (aka Captain America) and achieving a moderate showing in U.S. cinemas.

It’s not very good.

However…

Actually, wait. Let me deal with the ‘not very good’ first. The monsters are borrowed from Starship Troopers. The acting is borrowed from a phone-your-performance-in TV Movie of the Week. The story, unfortunately, isn’t borrowed from anywhere. Would that it were. Indeed there isn’t really a story at all. The ‘Reapers’ (as the giant galumphing bugs are called) can’t get you as long as you’re above 8000 feet. This seems like an oddly precise ‘elevation’ – which is never explained – and getting over ‘The Line’ before the Reapers skewer the various protagonists reminded me more of playing ‘British Bulldog’ in the playground back in the 1960s. This might have been scary if wrestling with the Reapers’ spiky limbs wasn’t so reminiscent of an encounter with Rod Hull’s Emu.

Anyway, Will’s son has run out of something that’s keeping him alive (although to be honest, he looks fit and healthy in all of his dialogue scenes) and so Will (Anthony Mackie) has to descend to Boulder, Colorado at 5,400 feet to stock up from the deserted hospital, and pop along to the lab where his physicist friend, Nina (Morena Baccarin) used to work, on the off-chance she can come up with a way of killing the Reapers that never occurred to anyone else amid the eight billion people on planet Earth, with their associated weaponry, underground bomb shelters, scientists etc.

What follows happens simply because it does, and not because of any character development or revelations.  Elevation is merely a series of events and certainly not what any self-respecting screenwriter would call a ‘story’.

However…!!

Right at the end of the movie, there is a revelation. Indeed it’s by far the most interesting thing in the whole 92 minutes. In fact, had anyone in the creative team been paying attention, they would have got to this revelation at the mid-point and spent the second half exploring its fascinating potential.  As it is, the revelation warrants a mere shrug from Baccarin and a leftfield post-credits coda which seems to be lamely begging for a sequel.

Verdict: Elevation is the cinematic equivalent of watching someone top up the photocopier toner in the stationery office of the Nostromo while, somewhere off screen, Ellen Ripley is battling to the death with the xenomorph. 3/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com