Elevation

The world is destroyed, 96% of the Earth's population has been wiped out by an underground, extra-terrestrial threat that crawled out of enormous craters and slaughtered billions. Robot-like beasts with the anatomy of a giant Transformers lion (with a scorpion tail) rule the planet when Elevation begins, and the only salvation for the mere 4% who managed to survive is to stay above 2,400 metres above sea level, where the murderous super beasts cannot reach them. We are not told why, how it all fits together, or why the main character's (Will) asthmatic son can run like a madman but suddenly cannot breathe when he lies down in his bed to sleep. This is the beginning of a film that contains zero logic, weak dramaturgy, poor acting, and extremely little real suspense.

The story is simple, and might have worked if the script had been polished further and a different director had taken on the job. Will (Anthony Mackie) must travel below the altitude limit of the monsters' murderous rampage to find a new filter for his eight-year-old son's breathing apparatus. He knows that it is most likely a suicide mission, but he has to try, and he takes with him former researcher Nina (drunken but brilliant), who claims to be on the verge of finding a way to kill the enormous reaper alien robots.

John Krasinski's acclaimed, hugely successful A Quiet Place was released in the spring of 2018 and, as we all know, created a wave of similar films that are merely trying to ride the wave. Netflix was quick to release a shameless rip-off in The Silence, the Sandra Bullock film Birdbox swapped silence for sight, while the Nicolas Cage film Arcadian swapped hearing/sight for light. However, the basic premise was the same in all of these films, and Elevation should of course be lumped into the same category.

This is A Quiet Place from Temu, with all the unimaginative monster design and paper-thin characters that entails. Whether Will is running away from the absurdly fast alien monsters or blowing up an oxygen tank to kill one of them, there is never any tension, suspense, or pace. It never becomes captivating or believable, and when Will and Nina run down into a mine to escape - even though they know that the Reaper monsters live underground - there's not much else to do but laugh.

Mackie is obviously no Tom Cruise, but he has something that's hard to put your finger on. In Elevation, he doesn't play a grand master role, but at the same time, he holds together a couple of scenes that would never have worked without him, as the rest of the ensemble is deplorable, genuinely deplorable. In that sense, it's possible to find some mitigating circumstances here, or minor glimmers of light, but on the whole, Elevation is, as I said, just another bad A Quiet Place copy.