Epic tale of man vs mountain

Rating: 7/10 (27 September 2015)

"Based on a true story" - five words that usually signal an emotionally powerful tale of triumph over adversity. Attaching them to Everest, the latest in a veritable avalanche of biopics heading our way this autumn (with Legend, The Walk, Steve Jobs all joining the melee), all but guaranteed a tale of Man conquering a treacherous Mother Nature.
Not quite.
Relating the events of a 1996 expedition, Everest the movie makes the occasional, perfunctory attempt to understand why otherwise sane human beings feel compelled to spend tens of thousands of dollars risking their lives on the slopes of Everest the mountain, but never really succeeds in answering this question. Elsewhere there are rudimentary pokes at the dangerous and polluting commercialisation of extreme mountaineering not to mention an inadvertent swipe at an industry that so easily expends the costly resources of a developing country (not to mention the lives of its countrymen) plucking wealthy Westerners off the side of a mountain they shouldn't have been on in the first place.
Certainly, Everest is one of vanishingly rare handful of movies that uses 3D to stomach churningly good effect. Swooping and gliding through the resplendent Nepalese landscape, Aerial DP John Marzano's vertiginous shots are the perfect showcase for Everest's imposing Himalayan vistas, a glorious virtual tour to be enjoyed from the warm, oxygenated safety of one's seat.
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur spends the first hour setting up his man vs. mountain movie, introducing us to a handful of protagonists (including Jason Clarke's dad-to-be Rob, John Hawke's improbable mountaineering mailman Doug and Josh Brolin's brash Texan, Beck), presumably in the hopes that we will come to root for them as they take on one of the most fearsome peaks on the planet.
Instead, it is the mountain itself that dominates both the narrative and the visuals, whether beguilingly calm in the background or unleashing its formidable fury upon the trespassers scattered across its slopes. Once our 'heroes' embark on the final ascent, it's difficult to distinguish one day-glo, puffa clad individual from the next. Not only does this dampen the emotional impact for most of the second, catastrophic half of the movie, it also underlines the film's frankly depressing marginalisation of female and ethnic characters. The most visible are Keira Knightley, Robin Wright and Emily Watson, relegated to the role of worried wives (surrogate wife in Watson's case) waiting back at their respective homesteads, characters with less depth than the resplendent scenery. Most galling is the treatment of Naoko Mori's Yasuko, a diminutive Japanese mountaineer attempting to summit the last of the Seven Peaks, who is insultingly sidelined in favour of virtually every male in the film.
Having spent two hours relating the cataclysmic events of May 1996, Kormákur inexplicably shifts into overdrive, wrapping up its devastating finale in mere minutes. For anyone (like me) unfamiliar with the details of the '96 expedition, the result is unsatisfying, lacking an emotional pay off that no number of over-the-credits photos of the real-life people featured in the movie can replace.
Still. Notwithstanding these flaws, Everest is at the very least a thing of flawed beauty that best hits home when lingering over the majestic Himalayan landscape. Ironically, the film's success in conveying the sheer doggedness of its protagonists' inexplicable pursuit of the peak is what eventually undermines it. Kormákur may get you to root for his headstrong mountaineers but while he had no control over the events he had to portray, a badly mishandled ending sours the entire endeavour.