Fly Away

Elephant (2003) by Gus Van Sant was stunningly realistic. The way how it depicted the lives of students in school, the way how the students treat each other and etc. amazed me so much. This movie reasuured my friend's fear that anyone could turn out to be a school shooter.

This movie reminded me of Vantage Point in a way that it followed around the characters and showed the same incident in different views and angles, and, by doing that, developed its main plot. I saw Vantage Point with my friends when it first came out in the theater, and really enjoyed watching it. All of my friends disagreed with me saying it was too repetitious and boring, but seeing one same incident in different points of view made me feel like I was in the shoes of that distinct character. Likewise, for Elephant, when it showed from all distict characters, (although it is true that the pace was a lot slower than Vantage Point, so that kind of bored me,) it gave a sufficient effect as though I was being that character or at least watching right next to him/her for each separate scene.

There were many scenes where the characters blended into the background. For ex: when John walks around the hallway, his yellow shirt blends into the yellow-ish background. I thought this hints to what kinda of personality each character may have: John blends into the crowd and does not speak out or stand up too much. And I think this was proven true when he saw Alex and Eric walking into the school building with guns and other dangerous stuff and didn't do anything to prevent them or let the police know.

Another thing I noticed was with the character Nathan. When he walks to the school from the courtyard, he is wearing a "lifeguard" sweatshirt. This is ironic because Nathan is one of the people who "trigger" (no pun intended) Alex to become a terrorist. Just a thought.

A scary thing in my opinion is that the names of characters were actual names of the actual actors/actresses. Maybe because they were their actual names, (or maybe I just have strange...psychic powers o.O) Alex looked like "Alex", Eric looked like "Eric", John looked like "John" and such. I could definitely tell who was who without looking up their names.

I thought this was quite...risky, scary and dangerous all at the same time because the characters, since their first names are the same as the characters in the movie, might conform to the way how the characters act and think--since they spend a lot of time acting and trying to act like that character--and this might be a problem for the shooters, and they might become violent or something of that sort. So I looked up on internet for the actors of this movie, and i dont know whether I should cheer in being right in my "assumption" or be sad because my assumption seems like it was correct. I saw a recent picture of Alex Frost who played "Alex" and he looks like...he's been friends with drugs and alcohol for life. Well, this also is an assumption, so...don't quote me on it. xP

Over all, this movie was threateningly powerful and poignant. Gus Van Sant does not put in much message of his own, but rather, delievers the story based on a real incident in Colombine. However, in doing so, I think he gets more satisfactory outcome than he would if he tried to twist or embellish with extraordinary stuff.

Elephant should remain as an ordinary high school related movie. Except that it's not.