Everest Movie Review

Everest (2015)

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Written by: William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy (screenplay)
Directed by: Baltasar Kormákur
Starring: Jason Clarke, Ang Sherpa Phula, Thomas Wright, John Hawkes, Michael Kelly, Josh Brolin, Kiera Knightly, Sam Worthington, Jake Gyllenhaal, Robin Wright
Rated: PG-13
Watch the trailer

Plot
As you might guess, this is a hiking expedition up Mt. Everest based on the events of the Mt. Everest disaster of May 10, 1996, one of the deadliest days on Everest.

Verdict
This is engaging start to finish, and the mountain setting always provides impressive scenery. It's like watching a busy highway knowing a pile up is imminent. Despite knowing what will happen, you can't turn away from the impending tragedy. I was locked in for this ride the entire way.
Watch it.

Review
I assumed a lot of the natural settings were CGI, but many scenes were filmed on location at the Mt. Everest base camp. Other scenes were filmed at the Alps in Italy and Iceland. The Hillary step and Camp 4 were shot on a sound stage, but refrigerator trucks were used to bring temperatures to freezing.

Everest -See that little dot of a person? They don't make it.

While this certainly has the potential to be exciting, I wasn't expecting much. It has a number well known stars who don't get top billing.
The first few scenes educated you on how dangerous the ascent can be. The death zone is the top three-thousand feet of Mt. Everest and any 26,247 feet where there isn't enough oxygen for humans to breathe. Your body is literally dying because humans aren't meant to be that high. This zone is where most deaths occur. With the lack of oxygen, people can go crazy and hallucinate.

The trick, as the movie tells us, is to make it up and back before dying. This movie violate my pet peeve of showing the first scene and then cutting to a scene six weeks earlier. I understand opening with an exciting scene, and at least this movie didn't have the gall to show us one of the final scenes and then cut back. The first scene was near the beginning of the movie.

I get wanting to scale a big mountain and to do something so few people ever do, but this is like training wheels or piggy backing. Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) is taking people up the mountain that shouldn't be on the mountain. At least the movie did address this later with another guide chiding him for that very thing.

Throughout the movie I was more interested in what would than what is happening. The first half is all set up, establishing the dangers of climbing and even an intense scene where Josh Brolin's character almost plummets to his death. The visuals are great, and it does a good job of locating the characters. I never felt lost or wondered where the hikers were. There are many movies with a much smaller scope that can't located characters in the world at all, leaving me wondering, "Where are they?"

Everest -Surprisingly engaging.

Gyllenhaal provides a nice turn in a small role. He often picks intriguing roles that don't always seem geared to just making money. Gyllenhaal's character tells Hall, "If you can't get up there by yourself you don't belong on the mountain." He then accuses Hall of hand holding too much. Hall may be the best hand holder, but the mountain is dangerous. We know Hall is taking people that don't belong. Other climbers are turning back, but Hall wants to keep going. This is a business for him, and you wonder if he was too cavalier just to bolster his business. He told his clients his job is not to get them to the top, but to get them down. Is that true?
While the movie is enjoyable, it's a waiting game. When is it going to happen, when does the disaster start? It's a slow burn. Every time they push forward you know it's a mistake. They're trying to beat the storm, and we know it won't happen. Though, it was part bad luck to have a storm of that magnitude. The last quarter is everything for which we've been morbidly waiting. People are freezing to death, falling off the summit, the storm hits, and help is not on the way.

This is a movie that could lean towards strong emotional manipulation, but it never does that. The fact that everyone can hear Hall's radio transmissions and they know he'll die on the summit was actually under utilized.

Brolin's character looks like something out of a horror movie. He makes it back to camp despite other climbers assuming he was dead. This was the one part that stretched my suspension of disbelief. I don't know how he had the energy to make it back, but that did actually happen.

Watching this, I wonder how Sir Edmund Hillary was the first to climb the mountain. Hundreds of people have died on this mountain and people are still dying. The ascent is littered with dead bodies. Modern climbers have ropes staked into the mountain, ladders traversing crevasses, and oxygen bottles to help them breathe. How did Hillary do it the first time with none of those advantages?