because it's there

Rating: 5/10 (22 September 2015)

Very impressive technically, well enough acted given the difficulty of making any kind of mark when there are so many characters, and nowhere near as badly written as I'd anticipated, this is a solid movie that tells of an episode in the existence of a mountain.
The huge scale of the scenery is pitted against the puniness of the humans. As the cast make their way over bottomless crevasses and veer far too near the edge of the next ridge, it does get genuinely scary from time to time. The action sequences are skillfully filmed and edited, and definitely worth experiencing in 3D and big sound.
Those are the plus points. The minuses are to do with the compromises required to fit the story into the tight shoes of commercial cinema. It's not just a matter of clunky exposition. It's the presence of big name actors who, excellent as they all are (and I am a real fan of Jake Gyllenhaal) inevitably stand out as faces against their lesser known colleagues. They can't help but turn EVEREST into one of those all-star disaster movies like THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE or THE TOWERING INFERNO. I think it would have been better not to have the stars. They militate against the true-to-life, in memoriam aspect of the film.