Baltasar Kormakur’s disaster movie Everest recreates the tragic deaths of 12 mountaineers on the world’s tallest peak during a snowstorm on May 10-11, 1996. Over the years, several conflicting accounts analysing the role of possible human error that claimed so many lives have emerged. In Kormakur’s respectful telling, the treacherous weather was the culprit, but the movie does hint that adamant individuals might have also played a role. The song in the background during a pre-ascent party at the Mount Everest base camp is the Crowded House hit “Everywhere You Go, Always Take the Weather With You.” As events seem to prove, obdurate climbers who ignore the signs and insist on reaching the top might just have escalated the death toll.
Did they or didn’t they? The screenplay by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy dances around this question. The main reason for setting a film on the planet’s highest mountain seems to have been to deliver an action adventure that is best viewed in 3D and on an IMAX screen. Everest excels in this department. The immersive cinematography, production design, and combination of location shooting and computer-generated imagery place viewers on every curve of the mountain, which is often shot from the ground up to give a sense of its grandeur. The mandate to create a haunting and blindingly white spectacle that transports audiences to the top of the world is perfectly fulfilled, and the sequences of the increasingly dangerous upward trudge deliver the expected chills.
Although several expeditions crowded the mountain on the fateful day in 1996, the focus is two of them: Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), the pioneering commercial expedition organiser who paid a heavy personal price for his efforts to give mountaineers the summit of their dreams, and Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin). Both men are given wives who chew their nails back home (Keira Knightley and Jessica Lange), a courtesy that is not extended to the others. The cast is crammed with marquee names, including a wasted Jake Gylenhaal as Rob Hall's rival Scott Fischer (shown here as a frivolous surfer type), Sam Worthington, John Hawkes, Emily Watson and Michael Kelly, all of whom pick up their pay cheques with utmost professional courtesy. The Sherpa guides, including Hall’s associate Ang Dorje, barely get a look-in.
The 121-minute screenplay stacks its thrills in the early sequences, so the actual snowstorm and its terrible consequences play out like a sideshow. Everest takes us right to the top but is in such a hurry to get back to base camp that it ignores a question posed by travel journalist Jon Krakauer’s character to the summiteers: why is scaling Mount Everest so important?
The struggle between human will and the mountain’s unbending nature is conveyed in the most basic and obvious terms. The movie shows us how the climbers reached the top, but isn’t interested in understanding why some of them died.
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Did they or didn’t they? The screenplay by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy dances around this question. The main reason for setting a film on the planet’s highest mountain seems to have been to deliver an action adventure that is best viewed in 3D and on an IMAX screen. Everest excels in this department. The immersive cinematography, production design, and combination of location shooting and computer-generated imagery place viewers on every curve of the mountain, which is often shot from the ground up to give a sense of its grandeur. The mandate to create a haunting and blindingly white spectacle that transports audiences to the top of the world is perfectly fulfilled, and the sequences of the increasingly dangerous upward trudge deliver the expected chills.
Although several expeditions crowded the mountain on the fateful day in 1996, the focus is two of them: Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), the pioneering commercial expedition organiser who paid a heavy personal price for his efforts to give mountaineers the summit of their dreams, and Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin). Both men are given wives who chew their nails back home (Keira Knightley and Jessica Lange), a courtesy that is not extended to the others. The cast is crammed with marquee names, including a wasted Jake Gylenhaal as Rob Hall's rival Scott Fischer (shown here as a frivolous surfer type), Sam Worthington, John Hawkes, Emily Watson and Michael Kelly, all of whom pick up their pay cheques with utmost professional courtesy. The Sherpa guides, including Hall’s associate Ang Dorje, barely get a look-in.
The 121-minute screenplay stacks its thrills in the early sequences, so the actual snowstorm and its terrible consequences play out like a sideshow. Everest takes us right to the top but is in such a hurry to get back to base camp that it ignores a question posed by travel journalist Jon Krakauer’s character to the summiteers: why is scaling Mount Everest so important?
The struggle between human will and the mountain’s unbending nature is conveyed in the most basic and obvious terms. The movie shows us how the climbers reached the top, but isn’t interested in understanding why some of them died.
