A Great Cinematic Experience

Rating: 8/10 (2 September 2015)

For the 99.999 percent of us who will never climb Mount Everest, the new 3D Imax drama Everest provides plenty of vividly illustrated reasons to rationalize leaving it off one's bucket list. However, there are quite a few good reasons to see this robust dramatization of a 1996 assault on the world's tallest mountain that went disastrously wrong, beginning with the eye-popping, you- are-there visual techniques that make you feel glad indeed that you're not actually up there at 29,029 feet, but also including multiple characters sufficiently humanized to create real concern for their fates, and an attention to realistic detail that gives the film texture. Universal should be able to add this one to its impressive list of 2015 box-office successes. This autumn seems to be the season for vertigo-inducing 3D Imax releases, what with this and the World Trade Center tightrope-walking drama The Walk in the offing. All the same, Everest doesn't go in for cheap shots or sensation for sensation's sake, remaining close to the men and women who have journeyed to the Himalayas for different reasons but for the same purpose: to get to the top of the world. With its perilous central premise and gallery of individuals some of whom are destined not to make it, you could say Everest is a disaster movie in the old Hollywood sense of the term, but it doesn't feel like one. And that's a good thing. Telling the same story as, but not officially based on, Jon Krakauer 's best-selling book Into Thin Air (perhaps because it was already officially adapted for a 1997 TV movie, Into Thin Air: Death on Everest ), the film hinges on the freakish conditions that led to the deaths of eight climbers on May 10, 1996. Krakauer is present as a character (played by House of Cards' Michael Kelly), there to write an article for Outside magazine. The fact that some engaging, friendly Aussies are front and center as the main tour organizers and guides may account for a good deal of the films immediate accessibility; they're the competent, reassuring type you'd feel good entrusting yourself to on such an expedition. Running Adventure Consultants is Rob Hall ( Jason Clarke), a seemingly all-around great guy, and he's helped out most importantly by logistics coordinator Helen ( Emily Watson ), and guide and close friend Guy (Clarke's fellow ex- Terminator Sam Worthington).