Almost reaches the top

Rating: 7/10 (18 November 2015)

If, when you think of Everest, you think of a film where a bunch of suicidal people embark on a basically pointless expedition, then (unlike the main characters) you're on the right track. Okay, that's selling the film short a bit. The fact is that Everest is what you might call a slow-burn thriller. But we'll get to that in a minute.
Rob Hall is a guide for the people willing to climb Mount Everest. Several people have signed up and are assigned to his team, so he says goodbye to his pregnant wife and gets on the plane to Nepal. Rob and his group of climbers head to base camp near Mount Everest where they meet the rest of the team and prepare for their arduous climb.
It's the attention paid to this preparatory part of the film where we get an idea of who these people are and why they do what they do. When I saw the trailer, I was expecting an action-packed modern action flick, but I was pleasantly surprised by the time spent in these preparatory phases. It's all too easy to succumb to relentless action without laying the groundwork in advance. Ideally, by allowing the audience to get to know the characters well in advance, the emotional payoff is supposed to be greater when there's trouble brewing.
The keyword here is 'supposed'. Whether or not the early character development is adequate enough to tug at anyone's heartstrings depends on the people behind the camera. It's here where the film can fall a bit flat, particularly in its attempts to explain character motivation, why do these characters (and by extension, similar people in real life) risk their lives just to make it to the highest peak on the earth? Each character provides different answers and we kind of understand them, but the film never really digs deeper. After all, there's a pretty huge mountain to climb which leads us to the best aspect of Everest...
...the cinematography. No, not the 3D, the actual cinematography. The 3D is decent, but the way the film looks and feels doesn't just come from a gimmick like 3D. Great production design and cinematography look great on their own and aren't necessarily improved by 3D glasses. The Everest looks and 'feels' immense, the snow and ice feels cold. There's a few instances of makeup that also impress, particularly when one character wakes up hours after falling asleep high on Mount Everest. When he wakes up, it looks like the only way he'd get the frost off his face is if his face came off with it. Nothing wrong with Everest in the visual department.
The action scenes themselves are thankfully quite grounded. You won't find any flashy editing techniques around these parts. This extends to the death scenes as well which I find very refreshing. Think about it: you've got a film about climbing Mount Everest. It's the perfect opportunity for literal cliffhangers where one guy always says how he just...can't...hold on...much longer. But Everest avoids these pitfalls (pun intended) and when someone falls in the mist-filled abyss, we don't even see him drop; he just disappears from view while the camera remains centered on the point where he just stood. It's this lack of audience manipulation that I'd like to see more of.
And that's Everest in a nutshell: a visually stunning experience that prefers characters over action. If only the character development itself was a just a little more fleshed out, we'd have a real winner on our hands. On a scale of base camp to summit, I give this a camp four.