Everest is Beautiful and Heartbreaking

Rating: 9/10 (2 October 2015)

This movie definitely lived up to the trailers and gave us one heck of an intense and heart-wrenching film. I wasn't expecting to like this one as much as I did even though the trailers looked great. It's easy to mess up with this kind of movie and give us something boring and way too bogged down in trivial details. Not this movie though. The character interactions are great and the climbing scenes are realistic but suspenseful. The excellent cast combined with great directing by Baltasar Kormakur make this film a bit of a nice surprise for me. I honestly didn't even realize that this was based off of a true story going into it. That just makes it even more heartbreaking. Let's talk about the story a little bit.
Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) is an experienced climber that runs a business getting people up to the top of Mount Everest. Obviously this is no easy feat so it takes many weeks of hard work and training to prepare everyone's bodies for the climb up there. Hall leaves his wife Jan (Keira Knightley) to help the newest group of not quite amateurs but not exactly professional climbers to tackle Everest. Everything seems to be going well at first but a series of seemingly unrelated events snowball into a tragedy as Hall's group as well as another are stuck on Everest during a particularly brutal snowstorm. This causes many other people to try and rescue whoever they can from the group. Unfortunately, not everyone's making it home from this one.
I'm a little surprised that a movie like this was able to accumulate such an amazing cast of talent. Jason Clarke is great as the compassionate Rob Hall. This guy is fairly new to me but I'm liking what I'm seeing from him. Hall truly cares about helping his people and he wants to protect them as much as he can. He has seen first hand what the brutal conditions of the mountain can do to people and he obviously wants to help them avoid that. I was happy to see John Hawkes play the likable Doug Hansen, a man that is obviously out of his depth but you can't help but root for him. I haven't seen this guy much after Deadwood but he always shines in whatever I see him in. Josh Brolin plays Beck Weathers and I have to say that I'm always a fan of this guy. He's likable, but not too likable. He's obviously flawed but he's another character that you can't help but cheer for. There are so many other actors and actresses that make this film what it is but I don't have room to talk about all of them. Keira Knightley, Emily Watson, Jake Gyllenhaal, and many more mean this movie isn't exactly lacking in the talent department.
This movie is straight up gorgeous to look at. There are many great sweeping shots of the mountain and the surrounding areas that really make you realize just how large this entire mountain range is. Everything is just shot really well and I felt like I wanted to get up and go there. I don't know how much of the film is cgi but I know that a lot of this had to be filmed on actual real locations and I love them for it. I want to visit but then I remember that I've never climbed a mountain in my life and Everest probably isn't the best one to get my feet wet.
There's not really much more to say here. The movie is fantastic. The visuals are great, the acting is top notch, and the story is interesting and leaves you wondering what's going to happen next. I was a bit depressed by the end though because of the large number of people that died. The majority of the people that I was cheering for didn't make it. That right there tells you it's based off of a true story. I have to admit that I choked up a bit at the end. Anyway, the movie is great and go watch it in the theater, IMAX if you have one around you. This is the kind of movie IMAX was made for.