Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This is a difficult movie to weigh up. On the surface it might seem really ordinary. It's superior elements, i sometimes think is heightened by the music of Beethoven. I know Gus used his music in a wa y as a link to how Alex worshiped Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange, as the fine line between madness and genius. However I don't see that genius in these two youngsters that go on a killing rampage. I don't get to know them very well and it's easy to generalize about them and their intentions.Maybe that's what Gus wants to say. He has one conversation talking about how you spot a homosexual, and this makes you wonder in context of what we do so see, contrasting a seemingly feminine character with long blonde hair and the two straight-looking gay killers. But are they gay just because they kiss? And, what does that have to do with their motivations or sense of isolation from the rest of the school?Most of the other characters just talk nonsense all the time. That is realistic so it's not a criticism. It was an interesting decision by Gus to use these arb conversations. I mostly like the way he ties up the walks of all the characters around the school. i once saw a video that brings them all together and that made me appreciate the film more so.I used to think Last Days was his best film in this trilogy. Gerry wasn't very good, it was more arb and less satisfactory. Elephant has to be the strongest but it still leaves me empty at the end. It's not a film that discusses the why's. It's a film that just shows you simply what happened. And that's why I rate his decision highly, but not high enough.

The premise, interesting. The timing,poignant. The execution (probably not the appropriate word) horrid. If you like your films pretentious,pointlessly artsy and most of all feel the need to like such films that every art critic under the sun adores then this will be a nice way to waste an hour and twenty minutes. I cannot fathom spending a day with anyone who really truly liked this film. At one point it felt as though the film may go somewhere, the lack of dialogue may help to emphatise with characters and we may see some understanding as to why this happened and how it would effect the students we followed from the start. I felt no empathy towards any character. I feel empathy for the viewer and I beg of you if you have any common sense do not waste your time. I wasted my time writing a review but i do it for the people who detest films like this, stay away

I'm going to give this a two because it is really unbelievably bad. It's not in the same category of bad I would put other best/worst movies I am a fan of. The closest comparison I can make is the opening scene of Birdemic where the camera shows a car driving for an extended period of time while depressing music playing. Then it cuts to a short scene of walking. The amount of walking and panning in Elephant was excessive. I was constantly pausing and checking the clock to see how much longer. If I watched it repetitively like I have Airplane I might be able to catch something subtle I've missed but I don't have the heart or the time. I have trouble submitting reviews because I know people put their hearts and souls into making movies and who am I to criticize. But I felt I had to. With that said, the characters are cliché. I know the event depicted is of a serious nature and feel the characters should not have been reduced to a sort of Breakfast Club derivative.

Elephant is a movie directed by Gus van Sant that depicts the horrible events at Columbine in the late 1990's. I really love a lot of things in this movie and I like what I believe van Sant was trying to say and how he wanted to express that. The movie is structured in a non linear way, with many flashbacks and changing the perspective through the use of different characters. I like that he used actors that weren't known at the time, so it really felt like they were actual teenagers attending high school. The cinematography is great and the music just connects with the movie very well. I actually watched this film in my cinematographic appreciation class and I had absolutely no idea what it was about. It started really slow and introduced these "random" characters so I didn't know what to expect. Until you see what the movie is really about. After that it all made sense to me and the movie just starts feeling very dark end eerie.I believe van Sant achieved exactly what was on his mind and it is good, but man does this movie drag on. It has to do with the structure the movie wants to follow, seeing the same story pretty much told over and over again through the perspective of different characters, which makes it interesting but it really slows the movie down. I would be lying if I said Elephant didn't bore me at times.Gus van Sant tells this very unconventional story and he treats it with respect, but not indifference, he definitely has something to say here, but he likes to extend scenes unnecessarily and the movie is very slow. A good movie with a good message that just feels unnecessarily long.