Worth watching - in spite of the heavy heart.

Rating: 8/10 (12 October 2015)

I wasn't too keen for disaster movies but went on insistence by my dining companion. Whether one chose 3D viewing or not depended on one's tolerance of wearing the uncomfortable glasses for hours looking at images of glaciers, cliffs and precipices; we chose to brave it. Here we have a movie depicting the helplessness and the futility of mankind against the raw savagery of nature at its harshest - a most sobering and humbling experience. This was not an exact documentary of the events that occurred over that fateful period in May 1996, but it did faithfully describe the interactions, the emotions and the blunders of the major teams on Mount Everest at the time (except for the Taiwanese team, as one of their climbers was actually doing a Lazarus together with the Texan - as I learnt later). The portrayal was intense but not over-dramatic, as this would have degraded this movie into sob stuff. The inevitability of the chief protagonist's demise was handled with dignity and one could not but admire and honour the memories of him and other climbers (especially the postman - his reasons for climbing made that night's gathering the single most touching scene). Some would have pointed out that the tragedy resulted from multiple mistakes and oversights (the feud between teams and Sherpas, the mysteriously empty oxygen bottles, the refusal to accept one's physical condition, the competing and discordant summit attempts, the lack of preparation work, the under- or over-estimation, etc.), which was certainly true in hindsight. The good things that came out of this were the review of teams' summiting attempts and the fact that this tragedy did not extinguish the passion of humans to pursue their dreams. Therefore it was not a surprise to also find a full description of the events on the current website of the Adventuring Consultants. A meaningful movie and worth the time in spite of the heavy heart.