Elevated review: majestic landscapes, modest ambitions
It didn’t take long for immersive video creators to cotton on to the following equation: high-altitude shots + picturesque environments = irresistible spectacle. Before VR and MR headsets, audiences were familiar with aerial imagery via film and TV, first captured from helicopters and then drones. But there’s something different about encountering these vistas in immersive formats: like being plonked onto a virtual roller-coaster or positioned behind the eyes of a character in a first-person shooter, it just works, on a primal, visual level. How to turn that basic camera configuration into a fully developed experience is another matter.
Enter Apple’s documentary series Elevated: a collection of snack-sized (sub-10-minute) episodes that visit eye-popping environments across the globe. At the time of writing, there are three installments — focusing on Hawaii, Maine and Switzerland— all very much triggering the “oh look, pretty!” response. Slickly produced, and each narrated by a voice connected to the respective locations, these episodes share a tone of misty-eyed wonder that might otherwise feel a touch overcooked — but here is buoyed by the sheer might and majesty of the landscapes.
Developer: Apple
Year of release: 2024, 2025, 2025
Available on: Apple Vision Pro
Experienced on: Apple Vision Pro
I watched them in reverse order, beginning with Switzerland, which actor Carla Juri calls “the playground of Europe,” noting that “the best place to play isn’t on the ground.” Then, voilà: we’re floating through the air above an ice-covered mountain range, soon encountering other magnificent sights, including “the slowest express train in the world,” which inches through more postcard-perfect scenery. In the Maine episode, Tim Robbins reflects on how “fall is more than a season, it’s a feeling,” accompanied by landscapes covered in lush green and golden-brown leaves. In Hawaii, we begin by gliding through milky white clouds as the sun rises.
It’s eye candy upon eye candy: one awe-inducing image after another, paired with gently rhapsodic narration. The conceptually neat thing about the series is that it bakes aeriality into its premise; it is, after all, called Elevated.
Each episode is easy to watch, and quite enjoyable, but like too much VR and AR content, the series has a proof-of-concept feel, doing little to advance the development of new kinds of screen grammar. The hour-long 360 documentary Touching the Sky is a more developed experience, deploying similar kinds of eye candy (capturing Italy’s Dolomite Mountains, for instance, and the Mont Blanc massif on the French-Italian border) but wrapping them into a fully fledged production, encompassing personal narratives and a wider range of visual techniques.
Elevated, on the other hand, remains rooted in the early phase of immersive content, akin to the “Cinema of Attractions,” a term coined by academic Tom Gunning to describe early motion pictures built on amusement park-like appeal. Here that appeal is obvious, but limited: aesthetically the series soars, but in non-visual terms it rarely rises above the surface.