Everest

Synopsis: On May 10, 1996 a commercial climbing expedition to the top of Mt. Everest went disastrously wrong. This is what happened.

Everest has a first-rate cast but what you will really be watching here is the work of Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur who directed the compelling 2012 film, The Deep, about a fisherman lost in freezing waters off the south coast of Iceland as he takes you as close to the top of the world as you are ever likely to want to be, especially after seeing his film. Which is to say nothing against the performances, which in the case of Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes and Jake Gyllenhaal especially, are persuasively understated. But then when you're up against the world's tallest mountain it would be futile to play it any other way.

Everest has somewhat disparagingly been referred to as a disaster movie but this is seriously to devalue its achievement. Firstly, it is based on real events. These have no doubt been condensed and dramatized by screenwriters William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, at times, particularly with respect to the “off-mountain” sections dealing with the home lives of Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) and Bec Weathers (Josh Brolin), a little too sappily. However Everest is not some star-studded Hollywood contrivance but a fastidiously convincing account of a real life tragedy. Secondly, Everest is not designed to deliver the vicarious thrills of an action spectacular but rather to engage with the extraordinary human capacity to risk all and the price to be paid when that risk goes wrong. The rewards of climbing Everest, in this case the spectacular scenery and the elation of climbing the world’s highest mountain, are both relatively peripheral concerns here. The guts of the story are in how one copes when one's worst fears are realized.

To this point the film spends some time establishing its characters and setting the scene for the impending disaster.  Clarke, Brolin, Hawkes and Gyllenhaal are the main players here with at home in Texas, Robin Wright and in New Zealand, Keira Knightley and as base camp co-ordinator, Emily Watson.  Continuing her remarkable career, young Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki appears a team doctor. with Sam Worthington as a support guide and Naoko Mori as a middle-aged Japanese woman attempting to set a record as the oldest woman to have scaled Everest. Why Knightley I have no idea except perhaps as a marketing play but her good looks are a distracting bit of gloss on what is otherwise a commendably unvarnished production.

All these characters are sketched in economically, allowing us to understand their roles in the ascent and to feel their pain once things take a turn for the worse as a combination of human error and the caprices of Nature find them trapped in a blizzard. This is where Kormákur’s skills really kick in, the filming of the disaster being both intense and extraordinarily convincing and apparently achieved almost entirely without the use of CGI or stunt doubles (filming actually took place in Nepal, the Otzal Alps in Italy and Iceland). Kormákur doesn’t fiddle with the staging and with the snow-caked hoods, goggles and masks along with the howling wind and blinding snow, it is at times difficult to know who is who but that is exactly how it should be when you're hanging off the side of a mountain at the cruising height of a 747 and struggling for your life. 

 

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