Everest (2015)
Directed by Baltasar Kormákur
Inspired by the incredible events surrounding a treacherous attempt to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain, "Everest" documents the awe-inspiring journey of two different expeditions challenged beyond their limits by one of the fiercest snowstorms ever encountered by mankind. Their mettle tested by the harshest of elements found on the planet, the climbers will face nearly impossible obstacles as a lifelong obsession becomes a breathtaking struggle for survival.
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32 films that influenced Everest
What critics say influenced Everest
There are a few instances where it’s obvious the actors are working on sets, but for the most part the combination is seamless, and I found myself wanting to check out the 1998 documentary Everest that shot on the mountain using actual IMAX film cameras instead of the remastering process used here.
Still, this Everest can’t match the spectacle of the seminal 1999 IMAX documentary that is based in part on the same story.
(The events chronicled in Everest were previously depicted in a 1998 documentary of the same name.
One got a similar feeling watching the 1998 IMAX documentary, also titled Everest, but Kormákur's movie places you not just on the mountain but inside a story, inside characters' heads and inside human bodies as oxygen levels drop and extremities freeze.
The mountain in question is no stranger to the bigscreen, and viewers hoping to see it in all its glory might do well to start with a documentary like the landmark 1998 Imax film “Everest” or 2010’s “The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest.”
Or remade, since the story was broached with more immediacy in the 1998 IMAX doc, also titled Everest, that survived the freak blizzard dramatized here.
In many ways, "Everest" is a throwback to the grand old disaster films of the 1970s like "The Poseidon Adventure" and "Airport."
El problema era, siempre, que más que una integración coral genuina como en los filmes del gran Robert Altman (Nashville, 1975), el resultado final se veía fragmentado y difuso, dejando que el evento como tal se alzara como protagonista.
Telling the same story as, but not officially based on, Jon Krakauer's best-selling book Into Thin Air (perhaps changing things up because the book was already officially adapted for a 1997 TV movie, Into Thin Air: Death on Everest), the film hinges on the freakish conditions that led to the deaths of eight climbers on May 10, 1996.
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Each of these folks gets a mini-narrative — Weathers only feels alive on a mountain peak, but he’s promised wife Peach ( Robin Wright ) that this is his last one; mailman Doug got close to the summit last year and is determined to go all the way; Yasuko has climbed six of the seven summits of Everest and wants a clean sweep – not unlike the all-star cast of something like “Airport 1975.”
The only thing missing from "Everest" would be a movie poster with stars' photos accompanied by the slogan from 1974's "Earthquake" -- "Who will survive?"
The thought of climbing perilous icy peaks might not sound like most people’s idea of a good time, but watching brave men and women take on such challenges has led to some truly great films like Kevin Macdonald’s Touching the Void and the recent doc Meru.
The best ones are typically documentaries, such as Touching the Void (2003) and the recent Meru, in which the climbers explain their motivations in their own words.
Sharing far more similarities with real-life 1993 drama "Alive" than the action-centric likes of 1993's "Cliffhanger" and 2000's "Vertical Limit," director Kormákur is forthright in telling a story more about the ordeal of human endurance than calculated thrills.The ensemble is bursting with great actors, which makes their roles' shortage of complexity somewhat of a missed opportunity.
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Sharing far more similarities with real-life 1993 drama "Alive" than the action-centric likes of 1993's "Cliffhanger" and 2000's "Vertical Limit," director Kormákur is forthright in telling a story more about the ordeal of human endurance than calculated thrills.The ensemble is bursting with great actors, which makes their roles' shortage of complexity somewhat of a missed opportunity.
The movie's sense of group dynamics, finely tuned suspense, and attention to technical detail reminded me of Robert Aldrich's Flight of the Phoenix.