Majestic! I had never experience anything like it.

Rating: 10/10 (6 September 2015)

A movie that's as stunning and as majestic and as spellbinding as mount Everest itself. Even for many of us who've never been to Nepal, just the fact that Everest is the world's highest mountain requires us to respect it from afar. And I think that's what this film by director Baltasar Kormakur has accomplished, it respects the story, it respects the nature and it respects the memories of the lives lost during that tragic 1996 expedition.
Baltasar is an Icelandic filmmaker who knows how to shoot a film in such an environment where the weather can be unpredictable and it can go against you at anytime. He didn't want all of this movie to be shot entirely in a studio, this is not entirely visual effects work, they actually went to Nepal and some of the other locations include Val Senales, Italy. It's out there in the elements, outdoors locations that force even the actors themselves to leave their trailer comfort zone behind. And that is evident on screen, it really shows, because every single frame successfully makes us the audience feel like we're there, we feel the danger, as if we're there climbing the mountain, feeling the pain that comes with excruciating cold because human bodies aren't design to survive such temperature. I think the timing of the arrival of this movie could not have been more perfect. If EVEREST was made a decade or fifteen years ago, for example, when filmmaking technology and the cameras weren't as advanced, I'm not sure if it could've given us a movie-watching experience of this quality. This is not a heist thriller ala 1993's "Cliffhanger," this is an epic survival drama.
Many of us are familiar with Jon Krakauer's book, "Into Thin Air" since he himself was one of the climbers, but this movie is not an adaptation, because it's also loosely inspired by other accounts, other books about that same expedition, so in a way, what the scribes William Nicholson and also Simon Beauty and filmmaker Baltasar gave us is a reimagining but one that captures the essence and I think that's what the actors themselves aimed to do. Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Jason Clarke, all of them play these real characters that have families, some may have personal issues, and so the backstory or who's waiting for them on the other side of the world serve as an emotional anchor and a driving force. But you only get a glimpse of it, the script doesn't spend too much time in every last one of them, there are too many grounds to cover, so it provides just enough and then brings the attention back to this whole man vs. nature, this ordeal at hand, all over again, just like one of the characters says in the movie, "The last word belongs to the mountain." EVEREST movie does make me wonder why anyone would want to climb mount everest, but it's basically the same as asking ourselves why we do certain things, why we choose to attempt to conquer certain goals, whatever they may be, whether it's the need to inspire and be inspired, whether it's trying to escape our problems, whether it's the love of the climb, EVEREST goes to show that that desire could be both prideful and humbling.