EVEREST deals primarily with the pollution problem . . .

Rating: 8/10 (4 October 2015)

. . . facing the main Nepalese national park, which is now littered with hundreds of human corpses. I personally have hiked ALL the trails--maintained and "abandoned"--from the South Rim to the Colorado River in America's comparable leisure area, the Grand Canyon, and I've never seen so much as ONE human stiff cluttering a pathway there. (Several of my hikes were in the vicinity of a pack mule who had plunged to its death--or expired from old age and been kicked over the side by the wrangler--one mid-summer, and even THAT isolated carrion rarity stands out as an exceptionally odoriferous memory.) The Nepalese, on the other hand, have allowed the world's most famous peak to become festooned not only with the bodies of a plethora of suicidal rich Western geezers, but also with many tons of human waste, which constitutes a global disgrace. EVEREST glosses over this fecal nightmare, but it cannot sweep this mountain's wall-to-wall carpeting of cadavers under the rug. No one would hike into the Grand Canyon if the experience combined the outhouse scene from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE with the set decoration for HOUSE OF 1001 CORPSES. It's surprising that the Nepalese cooperated as much as they did here in exposing their national disgrace--it seems likely some form of "ambush journalism" was involved. Normal people do not see anything "heroic" about carelessly losing hands and noses while visiting a once-pristine world treasure, but leave it to a Texan to shell out $65,000 for the "privilege" of doing exactly that!