The technical achievements and truly breathtaking spectacle allow a moviegoer to sense a vertical slope at 29,000 feet. The story is based on the 1996 disaster that befell two groups of climbers, which was the same catastrophe detailed in the book Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. But perhaps more importantly, Everest also incorporates lines directly from the audio tapes of that day – tapes Kormakur, lead actor Jason Clarke (who plays climbing leader Rob Hall), and producer Tim Bevan listened to with Jan Arnold (Hall’s wife), fellow climber Guy Cotter, Rob’s daughter Sara Hall, expedition associate Helen Wilton, and the doctor on the mountain that day, Dr. Caroline MacKenzie.
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Krakauer is a character in “Everest”, played by “House of Cards” co-star Michael Kelly, but a peripheral, underdeveloped one. His presence as a journalist covering the expedition frames the growing tension between customer service and safety that’s inherent in the commercialization of high-risk adventures. The script shuffles between different subplots, on different stretches of the climb, as the storm worsens and small errors prove unsafe and even fatal. The other characters crack wise or choose silence, as though the desire to climb Everest is simply unexplainable. He never imagined that some of them might not make it off the mountain.
So when a handful of climbers do make it to the peak, it’s harder to feel their euphoria.
But as the group nears the summit, we can see the deadly dominoes starting to topple. Everest chronicles one of the worst disasters to occur on the mountain nearly 20 years ago. These include the wonderfully named Beck Weathers (Brolin), a cocky Texan with an unflappable wife named Peaches (Robin Wright) back home, and Doug Hansen (Hawkes), a completely ordinary mailman who just missed getting to the summit the year before. Still, director Baltasar Kormákur (“2 Guns“) and his cast craft a lean narrative tone that humanizes the action without an excess of gloss. The film trots along briskly and hits beats with sitcom precision as we go from sea level to base camp to the ultimate ascent.
It’s a remarkable film, and one you should absolutely see in its dizzying IMAX 3D presentation. A brief, thrilling scene with a helicopter is worth the price of admission alone. It’s an extraordinary cast of characters from professional mountain guides to amateurs paying thousands of dollars to get up to the summit for their bucket list. Unless you’re in the ideal center in an IMAX theater, the effect can be claustrophobic, and it does not make the emoting more effective. “His book is a first-person account and there are a lot of things that he assumes or thought that happened that didn’t really happen”.
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Everest doesn’t quite scale the dizzy emotional heights to which it aspires and it’s not always easy to distinguish characters when tragedy strikes in the eye of a storm, but there is no escaping the nerve-racking suspense that holds us in a vice-like grip. Maybe the story and the truth are supposed to be enough and anything else would have seemed exploitative. I understand the value (dramatic and economic) of clinging to the true story pedigree, but this is probably one of those cases where the creative license of fictionalization would have given us a tighter, more emotionally involving story.
