You won't be disappointed!

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I rarely review films. But this time I'm going to do that. The film is bad, really bad. I can hardly call it a film at all. Those who give praises and high ratings to this film should be put in that school as a sacrifice for wasting our time. There is absolutely nothing watchable, nothing happens until the last 10 minutes of the film. Believe me, what you are going to watch is just a first- or third-person walk along the corridors of the school. Camera on a shoulder of an operator follows one person walking from behind for 5 minutes, then another person for 5 minutes. Most of the time these persons are silent, sometimes they give comments, sometimes they meet someone and the camera switches to someone else. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens. Why there are so positive reviews, what people like in this film is beyond my comprehension. After 10 minutes of this torture, I've already wanted to switch it off, but then I thought may be there will be something else, may be the characters will start acting or at least talking, it couldn't be that people give 7.2 rating for nothing! Another 10 minutes of walking along the corridors of the school, now the same scenes and same walking but with different people, scenes started to repeat themselves. I've started feeling like someone was fooling me into watching this camera play. Another 10 minutes of walking the same corridors again and again made me angry. I've eventually fast forwarded to the last 15 minutes to see what's all this fuss about. After suffering 5 minutes of the same walking, two students bought guns and armour on-line, received them by post, kissed each other in a shower, dressed like rembos and went shooting everyone in that school, just for fun, as they said to each other. I couldn't understand their motives, because the creators of this "film" did not care about any plot and about making the characters to talk. So, do you want to tell me that just because of the last 10 minutes of heartless shooting everyone in the school this film is worse 7.2 rating???

Many U.S. school massacres have gone by since 2003, and they haven't made this film seem dated or less relevant.This film is a very bold achievement. It is filmed in a real school building with a cast mostly composed of real non-professional teenagers. We can't help but react to them emotionally. Some are irritating, some are pitiable, some are admirable for one or another reason. We follow them on long walks around the long corridors of this well-equipped school, we observe some of the minutiae of their day. The timelines of the characters are presented non-linearly; they loop over each other like a spool of film that has been allowed to unreel in a pile. And then some of them die, because there are school shootings in this country.The title "Elephant" was borrowed from a British short film by Alan Clarke, which concentrated on assassinations and terror killings in Ireland during the 1980's. There are some stylistic similarities - a lot of long walks, a lot of steadicam work - but the two films are actually very different works in tone and focus. The Clarke film is ALL assassinations. Clarke deliberately refuses to give any of his many shootings a political context or rationale, but he also declines to provide any matrix of ordinary life. In contrast, Van Sant's "Elephant" is very much about that ordinary life, and about how terrible it is that it gets abruptly cut off.People ask why students take guns and go out and kill lots of people. Some of the blurbs I have seen for "Elephant" unconsciously, and incautiously, adopt the "bullied teen" narrative. Some bullied teens may sometimes take violent revenge, either on their agemates or on the system, but that's not we actually see in Van Sant's film, and in fact I believe he deliberately undercuts this kind of facile explanation. There is only one instance of bullying on screen of one of the killers - some glop is thrown at him. The other killer accuses the principal of having mistreated him, but we didn't see it ourselves.Meanwhile, other kids whom we see in the course of the day actually deal with injustice and neglect and bullying with much more resilience. And a lot of things are going on in the killers' lives that don't involve bullying. Eric is into gun culture. Alex is frustrated that he can't get that piano piece right. Probably there are a lot of frustrated kids around the world, but in our country they can get guns awfully easily. (At this point someone will call it a "goof" that they apparently order guns by mail or package delivery, but this is a technicality.) And - bottom line - Alex really just seems to like killing and terrifying people.Van Sant, who not only wrote and directed this picture but also gets editing honors, gets full auteur credit for the enterprise, but there are a couple of places where I think he could have used a second opinion. Let's just say it - I think the "Benny" episode was odd. I don't mean that it's odd that it blows up movie conventions, that was good. (Ebert singled this out as a memorable point.) But I think it stands out, maybe more than in 2003, that this African-American student, the only one with a named segment, got no lines or personal background. Also I think the way the film ends on Alex's sadistic little gaming was a false note. Not that Alex wouldn't have wanted to act that way, but that kind of lady-or-tiger-or-both ending has been done a lot. But still, on the whole, this is a pretty amazing work.

A film that lacks the depth and tact to handle its very sensitive subject matter with the sort of respect it deserves. It fails to offer a fresh take on the incident and feels like it is simply using its high profile to create shock for shock's sake. Furthermore, the gross simplification of the idea that media and art can create violent tendencies in young people (an idea that was heavily debated at the time) is presented with possibly the single worst fake- video-game-in-a-film I have ever seen. In a scene where one of the shooters is playing a fake first-person-shooter game that looks like it was made in less than 20 minutes using MS Paint and the most basic 3D animating tool and is never expanded upon. This theme of media influence comes up once more throughout the film, where the shooters are seen watching and being seemingly engrossed by a documentary about Adolf Hitler and the power of propaganda in Nazi Germany. I can only assume this scene was intended to show that the school shooters were obsessed with Hitler and the Nazis, presumably meant to be shocking but in a way that came off as "oh, these kids are interested in the Nazis? Well, no wonder they would be capable of a thing like this".I'm generally a fan of Gus Van Sant's films but Elephant filled me with disgust and disappointment. I expected a more tactfully-considered and respectfully handled piece from a director whose work I typically find to be unique and thought-provoking. Instead I got voyeuristic and ill- conceived trash with forced shock value and an undeserved weight garnered only by the notoriety of the Columbine school-shooting.

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.