Primed for summit

Rating: Null/10 (1 December 2015)

You'll know what to find here, a disaster movie with people stranded on a mountain, grit and elegy in the right spots. At the same time it isn't more than that, grit and elegy merely in the right spots, exactly where you'd expect to find them on the way down.
But now a film like this, where do you want to see it rest? is it enough that it chills the body, perhaps warming up the heart a bit? It is such a bravely foolhardy endeavor where so much can go wrong but exactly on token of this I find myself hankering for something else as well, worldview.
See, we are up on the highest mountain on earth, the terrain is sparse, human character is laid bare by the elements. The endeavor is poetic anyhow; doing something for the sheer capacity of pushing yourself to do it. Not purely poetic as motives of different characters suggest. But we are primed to find a summit, a closeness to that human spirit that wants to lift itself up.
A worldview means to see all the things that happen to us, unfortunate as a lot of them may be, as more than just the result of dumb accident and negligence. They are of course also that but it falls on us to amalgamate the experience into vision for living. This is exactly what survivors in this case would ponder on for the rest of their lives, the meaning of it.
It is damage, hurt, loss, the parts that we have chiseled out of us that provide the opportunity for reflection, the impetus for a response to the world where these things happen. Can you hate a mountain for claiming a loved one or your limbs?
And it's common for amputees to feel a phantom limb where a hand or foot used to be, feel it as if still there. Is this any different with losing someone close? The mind not only surges through the entire body, it surges through the entire space of what we have known as life (it starts with memory but goes beyond).
We get a little of that here. The loving wife's voice reaching out to him 8000 km up in the frost, urging him on to her, and soon after the same thing as hallucinated vision that lifts a dead man up from his stupor. You have to climb back down on your own sometimes, no one will be coming, but the power of making a full return from the edge rests within.
But for the most part we have survival physics here. I would have liked to see more of this notion of persisting vision evoked with a roaming eye that lifts itself up from a body. We could for a start have a more visual eye of the mountain, crevasses and shelves of rock that we don't really explore. To see with an ecstatic eye after all means to go where common sense won't.