Imperfect Storm.

Rating: 6/10 (6 September 2016)

This is "based on a true story" of people who climbed, or tried to climb, Mount Everest in 1996. It was difficult enough getting to the peak but on their way back to base camp a storm blew up and four of the team were lost and one lost his hands and nose to frostbite.
It's more like a National Geographic Special than a feature film. The locations are magnificent and indifferent. The top peaks are wind whipped and the storm, when it appears, is congested with roiling black clouds and lightning. There have been other movies about mountain climbing but they've never used such effective computer-generated imagery.
The personalities -- some of them -- are established well enough without any complicated back stories but individuals are more or less lost during the climb, when everyone is bundled up and masked.
And the story is otherwise confusing. The director and, especially, the editor, Mick Audsley, are responsible for making it clear who's who and who's where. The occasional location titles help -- "Camp Number Two -- 2 PM." But I gradually lost track of what was happening except to two or three members of the team, and even then I didn't know just where they were. Some of the incidents must have been improvised for dramatic purposes. Doug is panting and exhausted but lets the rest of the team descend while he struggles towards the peak. The leader, Rob, helps him, and the two men finally stand alone, with Doug whooping and planting his fingertip on the point of the highest boulder. Since both men died, the scene is cast in doubt.
One of the film's more admirable aspects is its lack of sentiment. There are a few too many minutes of Rob (the sympatico Jason Clarke) moaning his last words over the radio to his wife Jen (the refulgently gorgeous Kiera Knightly) but otherwise the deaths are well handled. Two men slip off a cliff during the storm but there is no Wilhelm scream. There's no exceptional sound at all, just the constant whoosh of wind. Nor does the camera follow the falling body, tumbling over and over. Nope. The two guys slip on the snow and fall out of the frame. Nicely done.
Not to be picky but when one of the men (Doug, played by Josh Brolin) finally stumbles back into base camp on his own, all frostbitten and hypothermic and half blind, the first thing they do is take his frozen fingers and dunk them into bowls of steaming water. Eskimo mythology gives us several layers of hell, where the bad folks go, just as our mythology does. The lowest level of Eskimo hell is eternal torment associated with the thawing out of frostbite. There's no indication of pain here, just relief. And I hope that steaming water was merely warm rather than hot.
If one wanted to, he or she could read the analog of an organic lifetime into this story. Everyone begins in high spirits, calling each other "mate" and "man", all of them exuberant -- "What a GREAT VIEW." Then they reach the peak or almost reach it and begin a descent that ends in tragedy for some and distress for the rest.
What is it that drives someone to climb Mount Everest anyway? What the hell is the point? Nobody knows. "Because it's there," is too flip, and the reasons given by the team members are fatuous. It probably has something to do with self testing, seeing how much we can get away with, whether seeing how fast we can run without collapsing, parking illegally, or outwitting a mountain.