Everest
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Stars: Jason Clarke, Ang Phula Sherpa and Thomas M. Wright
Duration: 121 mins
Class: PG
KRS Releasing Ltd
A caption card at the beginning of Everest starkly informs us that until 1996, one in every four persons who reached the summit of the eponymous mountain was killed, before starting its account of the real-life1996 disaster which claimed many lives.
After two months of intense preparation and acclimatisation to the extremely-cold temperatures and thin air, the day had finally arrived.
May 10, 1996 offered the weather conditions required to reach the summit, 8,848 metres above sea level. Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), leader of New Zealand-based Adventure Consultants, and Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), team leader of American company Mountain Madness, began to lead their respective teams on the final leg of the expedition.
As the first smattering of climbers triumphantly reached the summit and began their descent back to base camp, together with those still climbing upwards they encountered a fierce blizzard, resulting in an immense fight for survival in the most horrifying and hazardous conditions.
Everest tells their incredible and tragic story, and Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur has created a film laden with some achingly-nail-biting tense moments in which he flawlessly recreates the mountain and its forbidding environment via actual location shoots and studio work.
It all comes together to authentically illustrate the force of Mother Nature – at once awe-inspiring and dangerously lethal. The beauty of the landscape is indescribable, with Kormákur offering many scenes capturing the majesty of the mountain range with some vertiginous shots that offer the viewer a hint of the hostile environment.
Everest does a good job... bravery, natural instinct for survival emerge when the going gets tough
Once the weather turns fierce and shows its ferocious teeth, enveloping the hapless climbers in swathes of blinding snow, cutting ice and high-velocity winds, the tension rises exponentially and, heart firmly stuck in mouth, the viewer hopes for some relief – which fails to arrive as the climbers desperately fight for survival and the people in base camp look on in horror. It is a perfect example of extreme film-making.
Where the film falters somewhat is in the characterisation of its protagonists, simply because there are too many of them jostling for screen time. The film deals with real people, many of them ordinary people who shared one lofty ambition. But a deeper depiction of each is not possible in a two-hour film that wants to fittingly honour all those who were on the two expeditions, many of whom tragically lost their lives.
The cast is led by Clarke as expedition leader Rob Hall. He at least has enough screen-time to give a creditable portrayal in which Hall emerges as a true hero. Conversely, Jake Gyllenhaal barely registers; and apart from establishing his character as the gung-ho mountaineer one as opposed to Hall’s more cautious one, we learn little about him.
The ensemble includes Josh Brolin as Beck Weathers, a Texas pathologist; John Hawkes as American post-office worker Doug Hansen, whose trip was partly funded by schoolchildren; and Japanese actress Naoko Mori as Yasuko Namba, a climber famous for becoming the second Japanese woman to reach each of the world’s Seven Summits, including Everest.
Emily Watson is Helen Wilton, the expedition manager who is basically a proxy for the audience. She sits helplessly in base camp as, via increasingly sporadic and garbled radio transmissions, she absorbs the horror of what is happening at the peak.
Keira Knightley and Robin Wright appear in small and unfussy yet effective and poignant roles as Hall’s and Weather’s respective wives at home, desperately yet stoically waiting for news of their husbands, both adding in no small way to the emotion and the drama that is unfolding so many thousands of kilometres away.
A film like this obviously poses one question throughout – what would possess anyone to attempt such an insane endeavour? It’s a valid question, yet the script by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy dedicates only a brief scene to this, when journalist Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly) poses the question to the climbers.
“Because it’s there,” says one! Yet their responses frustrate him – and us – and do little to truly capture what it is that makes men and women take these ridiculous risks for a challenge that requires arduous training in extremely harsh conditions. Is it just the conquering of a person’s inner fear? The mammoth adrenaline rush? Or is it more of a spiritual journey?
That said, Everest does a good job in demonstrating not only the camaraderie they shared, but the bravery they showed and the natural instinct for survival which emerged when the going got impossibly tough.