Books have been written about the 1996 Mount Everest
disaster. Like, six of them. Including John Krakauer’s bestselling, first-hand
account Into Thin Air. Throw in the
made-for-TV movie, a couple documentaries and countless articles, and you may
start to wonder: what’s left to say about the tragic collision of human error and meteorological
brutality that claimed the lives of five climbers and three border policeman on
the world’s tallest (non-oceanic) mountain 20 years ago this May?
According to Director Baltasar Kormákur’s (2 GUNS) EVEREST, nuthin’… but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still plenty to
show.
With an effective pairing of gorgeous, harrowing
cinematic spectacle and tense, tearful Hollywood melodrama, Kormákur’s film offers
a thrilling and largely respectful step-by-step dramatization of 1996’s
well-known tragedy.
‘96 marked
the five-year anniversary of professional climber Rob Hall’s (Jason Clarke) fledgling
business, Adventure Consultants – an extreme tourism company that specialized
in guiding deep-pocketed amateur climbers, like brash physician Dock Weathers
(Josh Brolin), determined mailman Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), and stoic
journalist John Krakauer (Michael Kelly), up some of the most treacherous mountains on
Earth.
Adventure Consultants’ whiz-bang first season on
Everest in 1994 convinced other expedition mongers, including Mountain Madness
founder Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), that Nepal’s hills were alive with the
smell of money. By 1996, Everest and the surrounding glacier were bottle-necked
with paying experience junkies and their attendant, hand-holding dealers, leading
to dangerous over-crowding on already perilous cliffs.
EVEREST
wastes no time in getting Hall, Weathers, Hansen and the rest of the crew onto
the mountain, where, from the bustling purgatory of base camp, Kormákur provides
a first dizzying, skyward glimpse of the ice-choked hell looming above. After
meeting Adventure Consultants’ base camp support, Helen Wilton (Emily Mortimer)
and Dr. Caroline Mackenzie (Elizabeth Debicki), the team begins their grueling
trek.
Towering ice walls; rattling, crevasse-spanning
ladders; the empty dark of glacial chasms; the pummeling winds of the eventual
storm; and the dreadful silence that follows are all reasons to see EVEREST in the theater. Not only is
much of Kormákur’s location-shot footage gorgeous to look at, but also, the way
in which he paces the onset and severity of volatile weather provides a brutal,
unexpected severing of tension that’s truly exciting to experience.
Over the course of EVEREST’s mostly brusque two-hour run, screenwriters and bio-drama
veterans William Nicholson (MANDELA:
LONG WALK TO FREEDOM) and Simon Beaufoy (127 HOURS) are content to let Kormákur’s enthralling
crane-swooping, cliff-hanging camerawork dwarf the characters into digestible
archetypes playing everything – from Rob
Hall’s paternal, peewee soccer coach encouragement to Doug Hansen’s clear-eyed,
all-in naiveté and Scott Fischer’s discontented, over-confident hunger for new
frontiers – straight from their hearts.
It’s an approach to storytelling that would prove
mortally trite or simplistic if EVEREST
had an interest in dissecting the events of May 10 and 11, 1996, for individual
fault or error, to parse history for blame. (Or to wage an ideological critique
of the corporatization of individual human endeavor. Or to explore the inverse
relationship between desired profit margins and acceptable margin of error.)
These versions of the story would be more complex
and, in some ways, more satisfying – diagramming a disaster for identifiable
past failures instills confidence in the preventability of future failures. But
they also wouldn’t be nearly as thrilling.
And I mean that seriously.
It’s a tricky notion – corralling the sprawling
chaos of real-life tragedy and its haunting echoes into neat, market-ready
matinee spectacle. I’m not generally one to revel in the diminishment,
simplification or sensationalization of a story like this.
Certainly Kormákur hones his narrative focus for
maximum emotional impact, but there seems to be little in the way of outright
embellishment. (Now, technical inaccuracies? I wouldn’t
know.)
And, though it never quite engages with the raw and
fleshy moral nuance of its characters or their situations, it nudges at the
complexity of both its victims and survivors enough to leave the thoughtful viewer
shaken and hungry for bigger answers.
Fortunately, as I said, like six books have been
written about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. There have been articles and
documentaries made by journalists, primarily looking to dissect and parse and
diagram and explore. To point fingers and allege preventable failures.
But the chilling core around which all of these
exposés have, ultimately, revolved – and that EVEREST places all its IMAX 3D energies toward - is the
beautiful, dumb, intrepid will of fragile men to confront the constant and
unyielding in hopes of finding, if only for a single moment, those qualities in
themselves. (3 out of 4 Stars)
I applaud Working Title for breaking new ground and not sticking to the 'Into Thin Air' version of the 1996 Everest tragedy, which is maybe why this book is not in this film's Credits, something that has not gone unnoticed by some professional reviewers.
ReplyDeleteWorking Title/the Director referred to Jon Krakauer as 'a writer who just happened to be on the mountain at the time'. To learn more about what actually caused this seminal event you will need to read 'A Day to Die For' and 'After the Wind'. Well done Working Title and Baltasar Kormakur for daring to break the mold!