Stronger on atmosphere than character, cold but grimly compelling.

Rating: 6/10 (3 September 2015)

It's not an adventure story. Everest is a harrowing and heartbreaking tale of man vs. nature that reaches great dramatic peaks after suffering through an overly long and slow ascent. The movie starts out on unsure footing with storytelling as uneven as the giant mountain's slopes but by the end it had my eyes frozen on the screen.
The "true story" on which the film is based is filed on Wikipedia under "1996 Mount Everest disaster." It concerns organized bands of hikers attempting to scale Mount Everest with an emphasis on "attempting." The story was chronicled in a 1998 IMAX documentary and has now been resurrected in this $65-million-dollar dramatic film directed by Baltasar Kormákur who was born, appropriately enough, in Iceland. In a month when U.S. President Obama purports to warn the public about the dangers of global warming, this movie comes along to make us stop worrying and learn to love global warming.
In a belabored, tension-free and yawn-inducing first act, we're introduced to the members of the ill-fated climbing expedition, most of whom, judging by their accents, seem to be from New Zealand. We're only nominally introduced to about half of them, or at least I think their names were mentioned once. Little insight is given as to what inspired (possessed?) these people to want to scale Mount Everest. "Because it's there" is one of the few reasons mentioned. Some of them don't seem to know why they're doing it. Judging by their personalities, it appears most of them were just bored.
Jason Clarke (John Connor in Terminator: Genisys) as the expedition leader serves as a calm and steady center in the ensemble. The undemonstrative nature of his performance does nothing to enhance the low energy of the tepid early dialogue scenes, but it does add to the sense of eerie, fatalistic hopelessness that the characters face after the "perfect snowstorm" arrives. When the most skilled character in the story quickly and calmly seems to embrace his dark destiny, it's a clear sign that there isn't much hope. If only the characters had been more energized in the beginning, it would have been easier to notice later that they were slowing down on account of being half-frozen.
Josh Brolin plays the only character that approaches having a dynamic personality. At first he seems to have just a minor part, but it eventually becomes clear why his character was played by the biggest name actor in the cast. Brolin has the closest thing to an actual character arc, but it's based more on basic life and death than on any lessons learned. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a character who is of so little consequence that I think he could've been cut out of the movie without anyone noticing a difference.
Where Everest succeeds beyond compare, no doubt enhanced by the premium IMAX 3D format, is in vividly capturing the characters' descent from the top of Mount Everest into multiple levels of wintry hell. This is not a disaster film in the conventional, mainstream sense, like the melodramatic and unconvincing San Andreas. This is a dark, stark, dramatic and intensely realistic portrayal of human beings swallowed up by a grim force of nature who are unable to do much except hope that they'll be spit back out again with most of their pieces still intact. The script does a good job of explaining in advance some of the specific things that can go wrong on this journey, even though the discerning viewer should expect that whenever a movie like this tells you what can go wrong, it will go wrong.
The technical prowess of the filmmaking in the back half of the film is unparalleled. Whatever combination there might have been of location shooting and digital work, the final effect looks seamless. The howling winds, blowing snow, gleaming skyscapes and cavernous crevasses, supported by a quality 3D conversion, all create a completely believable and harshly beautiful environment that is fully engrossing. Even a brief sequence involving a helicopter is more realistic and exciting than the phony, staged helicopter action scenes in lesser titles like the aforementioned San Andreas.
Everest is not a cliffhanger despite all the cliffs and hanging you may have seen in the trailers. This is the tragic tale that the mountain-climbing industry does not want you to see. It starts out making the pastime of mountain-climbing look like an unpleasant compulsion and ends up making it look like outright suicide. After seeing Everest, you might find that the best reason not to climb the mountain is because it's there.
*I viewed the movie in an IMAX 3D preview screening shown in the U.S. on September 2nd, 2015.