Rating: 
Summary: Boring? Yeah Right
Review: this movie isnt just about 2 kids that have a depressing look on life and decide to shoot up their school. You have to know what happened at Columbine in order to know what set these two kids off in the movie. And beleive me...this is a powerful movie! Van Sant tells shows you how a normal school day and kids going to clases, and having fun, and they dont expect whats going to happen. thats why they call it Elephant, because an elephant is huge and the school shooting is huge so someone should have known that something was wrong and stop what was happening.
Rating:
Summary: The deepest chills ...
Review: I knew nothing about this movie going into it except that it was a portrayal of columbine. This being said, I expected a documentary type film that focused on motives, characters, and sketched out a cause and a blame for the shootings. Boy was I wrong. What I found instead was a film that portrayed true reality much better than anything I've ever seen on TV or a movie screen.
A sense of normality is established within the first few minutes of the film. Knowing that something bad is going to happen makes every scene build with tension as we watch high schoolers go about their everyday lives, which are so simple, yet so complex, each one special in it's own way. There is no true explanation to any of the events in this movie. They just are. This is how real life works. The shooting just happens. This is how real life works.
The shots and sequences in the film and their drawn out nature combined with the forementioned reality sent deep chills through my body and mind while I was watching this film. Although the expected violence happened, there was no true climax to the movie. No relief, and no resolution. Just reality. Therefore, chills remained in my spine through the silent credits, the walk to the parking lot, and the drive home.
This movie makes no point of morals or what is right or wrong with our society or high schools. The point that you should gain from this movie is that what will be will be, and although true-life events are not sugarcoated, as most movies portray, there may be no rhyme or reason to the events that may occur.
Rating:
Summary: Boring? What did you expect?
Review: To those who found this film boring and totally missed the point of it...I feel bad for you. It seems to drag everything out but school is a 6 hr day that is endured by teenagers 5 days a week. It's a normal part of the week for them. No student went there anticipating a shooting. The point of the film was to show that no one had a clue what was ahead of them. The director was trying to make the auidence feel like a high schooler by following around 5 or 6 them during the movie. You, the viewer, goes to school for a day in this movie.
Rating: 
Summary: hmm.
Review: this movie pretty disjointed, and pretty uninteresting.
the thing is, i liked the idea, but jesus, try to make it keep my attention for more than five minutes. yes, our lives are full of mundane activies, but that doesn't mean you have to show ten minutes of some guy walking down a hallway.
i just wish that the director had fleshed it out a bit, made us feel something. it was pretty emotionless, and all i kept thinking was, 'just get to the point already!' and when it finally got the point, it was a properly DISSAPOINTING point.
this film contains about five million loose ends that are never resolved, virtually no character development, and an incredibly piss-poor ending. it gets two stars, however, because it really did have potential, but somewhere along the line it got completely mangled.
Rating:
Summary: This is not the forum.
Review: Elephant is a film. It is a provoking and intelligent version of events that potentally can happen at any high school, anywhere in the world. It took balls to fly in the face of public conservitism and Van Sant did it well. What annoy's me is the fact that people all over the world are abolishing a great film simply because it deals with a tragic event. This is not the forum for a moralistic or political debate, however, something has to be said about the power of film making if a single film generates such a barrage of disruption in a rather mundane socity.
Rating: 
Summary: lack of homework...
Review: i will not criticize this movie for being boring.(...). in this movie, the two teenagers who stage the shooting are extremely lifeless, they don't shed a bit of emotion, but rather, he just shows them absent mindedly playing video games and watching videos about the third reich. do you really believe that a child could so lifelessly take a firearm to his school, murder his fellow students, and take his own life? the fact is that we are turning our schools into prisons; undesirable places for teenagers, where they would rather kill each other and commit suicide than continue their lives in school. it is obvious that gus van sant did no research about the events at columbine high school, and i really wish people would begin to understand that our children are in serious emotional pain when they bring guns to school...
Rating: 
Summary: Film or audience failure?
Review: Personally, I thought the movie dealt with such a sensitive matter quite well. The film felt fresh, unbiased and real, I believed the characters that I saw. Gus Van Sant has left lots of things in the movie that people can latch on to if they want, to say that he is blaming this or that for the killings, but he seems to remain completely objective to me. Regardless, I think there is a monumental failure here that everyone is overlooking. Within the pages of this site, people spend hours writing critiques and arguing about which camera shots should have been used for which scenes, etc... I would imagine that the director's point in making a movie like this was to bring the issue of school shootings up and have IT discussed from as many viewpoints as possible. In this, the film has failed. Love it or hate it, people seem to be dissecting the medium of the message and not the message itself. To me the message is straightforward: "here is a bird's eye view of a difficult situation that reflects someone's reality". I don't know if he is intending to tell the Columbine story, as there is no mention of it in the film (text or spoken), but regardless it struck me as being very close to reality. If it doesn't to you, then perahps it would be beneficial to realize that it does to others and that's an important realization. By this I mean that although a Vietnam movie doesn't ring true to you it may do so for people who lived through it themsevles. One person's reality is another's "bad" movie. As a matter of fact, this whole group of reviews is quite representative of the aftermath of such school shootings... people gathering around arguing about tangential topics not really involved with the pressing issue itself. Then again, this is a movie review database, so perhaps that is an easy excuse to ignore my criticisms here. I think the movie raises an important issue and it does so with respect and intelligence. That's what counts and thus I do value it for that.
Rating:
Summary: a youths perspective
Review: I think its unfair to those people who do think this movie is boring, dull, bad acting, and bad dramatization to judge this movie in this way. Gus Van Sant obviously was trying to get into the life of teens in America. From what it looks like he did a good job, seeing as I'm a teen, and happen to live in America. The teen life protrayed in the movie, weather it be boring, or exciting, is the way teens in America see life as. Its a lot of hiding, and a lot of shawdow. Unfortunatly if people who did see the movie did not see past the shadow, and weren't drawn into the movie, missed out. If they really want to understand the movie, they should start remebering their high school life.
Rating: 
Summary: Unexplicable
Review: Well I saw this movie back in December and it hasn't left my mind since. I would give this movie 3.5 stars. My reasons are varied, but I'll start off with the fact that your attention really isn't immeresed in the film. What I mean is that a whole movie really can't just be a camera following kids around their classes the entire day without at least different camera angles or more dialogue. I can undertstand that Gus Van Sant was trying to be unique and different by sort of having the camera float around the school hallways too give it an eerie and gazing sense of feeling, but most people's attention spans aren't too good. I found myself to be on the edge of my seat this entire film, however, due to the fact you never knew when the climax would begin, in every single scene the slightest noise of something my heart would beat fast, just because you are anticipating the worst that is going to happen. This was effective throughout the film, and actually the only reason why you don't fall asleep.
HOWEVER:
This movie was very, very, very innovative. I was expecting the entire movie to be a gorey mess of drama and action, it was not. It was more just a very strange sadness throughout the film, because the audience is merely ghosts watching teenagers on what seems to be an ordinary day in high school, but it isn't and we know their fate is not too pretty. I really can't explain my thoughts on this film, it was just different. DO I recommend it? Yes, it will give you alot to talk about and most likely stick with you forever.
Rating:
Summary: Much more than just a school shooting
Review: A movie reflecting the Columbine tragedy has been a long time coming. Elephant has lived up to that perfectly. I was stunned by not only the graphic honesty of the film, but also by the supreme acting on the part of the inexperienced cast. For someone who was in high school at the time of the Columbine shooting, this movie not only tells of the horror and senselessness of the event, but it also has a much more subtle sub-story: the truth about American high schools. I left the theater feeling very moved. The movie really places you in a position that feels as though you're seeing the tragedy really unfold before your eyes. I highly recommend Elephant to anyone who ever had to endure the torments and torture of high school. This is a movie that will leave you with a very deep impression.
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