Interesting, but not great

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2015)

In 1996, the dreams of a group of Everest climbers ended in tragedy at the top due to poor decisions, short supplies, and blizzard conditions. This is a well-made and fascinating story, but it lacked emotional power for several reasons: In 3-D, every time the camera panned, the background images were an unrecognizable, shaky blur that left me queasy. I didn't feel the 3-D added anything to the scenery, which was already awesome (They really did film at Everest Base Camp). Another problem I had was that the characters were hard to tell apart with the beards, goggles, caps, and other gear hiding their faces. And lastly, there were a variety of accents that I found hard to understand, so I was basically just following the action like a silent movie.
The old question of "Why do you climb a mountain?" is never answered in this film, and there was only a very brief epilogue, but the movie does make you think about the costs versus the rewards of scaling the peak.
(There was a 1997 TV movie, "Into Thin Air: Death on Everest," which had a smaller budget but packed much more of an emotional wallop because it focused on personalities and backstories of the climbers.)