If watching grim adventure on the big screen is your thing

Rating: 7/10 (19 October 2015)

Everest is the tale of a 1996 ill-fated expedition to summit the highest peak in the world. When an untimely rogue storm hits, the already-dangerous task turns deadly. The events in this film are described in the Jon Krakauer book Into Thin Air, though this is not an adaptation of that book but a dramatization of the same event. (Krakauer figures into the story.)
In the same way that I saw Flight 93 and walked out knowing that I had seen a great movie that I would never want to see again, so goes Everest, which is pretty good but really sad at the same time (it's not as good as Flight 93 but comparable in the way it made me feel.)
At the heart of this movie is the question of the over commercialization of something as inherently dangerous as climbing the tallest mountain of the world. Personally, I feel that a feat so dangerous that it claims lives should be left to people who know what they're doing, not simply awarded to those who can simply afford the experience. There are definitely people in this world who look at thrill seekers and the "because it is there" crowd and shake our heads.
That said, when you push past this and get to the human stories, Everest is a well-done but gut-wrenching movie. The personal stories, while not overly dwelt upon, give a fairly basic picture of everyone's motivations for climbing the mountain. One man simply wants to inspire some school children back home. Another simply doesn't feel right doing anything else. And one woman is trying to complete the feat of having summited the highest peaks on every continent and has left Everest for the end.
There is a good 20-30 minutes toward the back end where this movie is totally engrossing, when it becomes a race against the storm and the threat of death is very real. You want to hope for the best, and in some cases that works out. In the end, Everest delivers the visuals you'd expect and tells the story it was going for and if watching grim adventure on the screen is your thing, then this may be the movie for you.