In "Everest," climbers are shown trudging past the frozen corpses of the mountain's previous victims, some 200 of which remain along the route to the top of the world's highest peak. We also see them walking past fellow climbers who are doubled over in agony as they vomit up blood.
And that’s just during the dry runs — the preliminary, partial ascents in which high-altitude mountaineering enthusiasts acclimatize themselves to the cold temperatures and thin oxygen in the weeks before they attempt the summit. Things don’t get better, only bigger, more in-your-face and more stomach-churning in director Baltasar Kormákur’s dramatization of the 1996 disaster that claimed eight lives on Mount Everest. Filmed in Imax 3-D, the movie is an orgy of suffering, a powerfully affecting experience that you feel with your gut more than with your emotions.
I'm not sure whether that is a good thing, or whether the feeling constitutes enjoyment. Even if you didn't know the outcome of the controversial climb — which involved too many competing commercial expeditions, hubris, judgment lapses, bad weather and communications failures — the movie plays out like a foregone conclusion as things move from bad to worse with the steady, dirgelike drumbeat of a funeral march. There are movies about hair-raising exploits that end well, but this isn't one of them. A foreshadowing of doom hangs over the film like the bulge of glacial ice that came crashing down from Everest's West Shoulder last year, killing 16 sherpas.
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"Everest" focuses mainly on two of the many teams that were being led up the mountain 19 years ago: one captained by New Zealander Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), a by-the-book guide, and the other by American Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), a long-haired mountain hippie with a more laid-back attitude. As in life, Hall's group includes the outdoor writer Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly), who wrote a 1997 bestseller about the tragedy, "Into Thin Air," and several other amateurs: a blustering Texan (Josh Brolin); a soft-spoken small-town mailman (John Hawkes); and a Japanese woman (Naoko Mori) who had previously scaled the other six peaks in what are known as the Seven Summits: the highest mountains on each continent.
Although the screenplay, by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, makes a perfunctory effort to turn those characters into people we can care about, that quickly falls by the wayside of this tale, which is more concerned with missing rope lines, empty oxygen canisters and injections of dexamethasone, a steroid used to prevent potentially fatal conditions common among high-altitude climbers. It’s an impressively technical film, with a visceral impact, that is not interested in — or at least not capable of — moving the audience deeply, despite side stories about Hall’s pregnant wife (Keira Knightley) or the schoolkids back home who are rooting for the mailman.
In any event, once the action gets underway, it’s nearly impossible to tell who is who, or even what they’re saying, as the characters are buried under parkas and visors. Many of the climbing sequences, which are truly harrowing, are shot either at night or in howling winds, and their location on the mountain is unclear. Because several of the characters — who also include a Russian, some South Africans and several Nepalese sherpas — have thick accents, the dialogue is often unintelligible. Despite frequent radio updates given in the script, courtesy of Emily Watson, who plays the base camp manager, “Everest” will be confusing to anyone who hasn’t read Krakauer’s book or the many other accounts of the disaster.
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“Everest” gets several things right, but it fails to find a way to make the average viewer relate to the people on the mountain. Krakauer’s character asks several climbers why they are doing what they’re doing, but the answers he gets — because it’s there; because it’s rare; because it cures depression — seem as unsatisfactory to us as they do to him.
“He might as well be on the moon,” says Knightley’s character about her husband when Rob is stranded by the storm, just below the mountain’s summit. That’s true of everyone in this rousing, but ultimately unreachable adventure story. I walked out of the theater with a knot in my stomach the size of a fist, but with a dry eye.
PG-13.At area theaters. Contains scenes of intense peril and disturbing images. 122 minutes.
(2.5 stars)ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLSwtc2gpq6sl6q2pbGOpqavoZWofK671aKcZqqVq7amw4yerZ6qlajBbrXSZqmoraOeu6h5wa6rZq2ep7Kir8eamaWdX2d9coGOaXBoaWZkgnqFj2tpm2hdarBzsIxqaJ5tXZeAebGMaW1xcGOWrqSuwG9rmKukpL%2B6esetpKU%3D