A movie that will satisfy the outdoor lovers and the occasional climber.

Rating: 9/10 (12 November 2015)

A movie for purists? Certainly no. But a movie that will satisfy the outdoor lovers, the occasional climber and - at least at it's beginning - the trekking crowds.
Good news: certainly not a typical Hollywood flick and surely miles away from the rather commercial K2. Surely not the kind of movie I would recommend for unadvised people to go spend a tuesday night with popcorn because this movie contains technical aspects that will make it boring for the crowd.
Talking about technical aspects others are better skilled to comment on this. The movie doesn't exactly illustrate the difficulties of climbing above 8000m. It was not shot on the Everest slopes either, as the closer to Everest scenes are filmed at the base camp, and not above.
The marking points of the movie are the moments of struggling for live and also the extremely important moment of decision making. I read a bit on the events of the 1996 and I don't remember any passage where the guides were instructing before ascension their clients that when the guide says 'you go back' the clients will have no choice but to obey. I wonder if they instruct this to the clients before the expeditions. Basically, this is the most crucial rule in high altitude climbing, a rule Messner and other great mountaineers followed like a law. No matter how close to the summit - even for a matter of hundreds of feet, no matter how many times the ascension was unsuccessfully tried before, no matter what the financial pressure; when it's time to give up and return, you have to stop and to go back.
On the flawed side, I felt the movie was giving too much time to the first 'trekking' part of the expedition, and too little from the moment the storm sets in. The movie also surprisingly skips an important passage when Beck is left for dead to slip alone in a collapsed tent for a night because the climbers in the nearby tents were thinking "he is going to die any way". So perhaps not all elements are shown in this film but it's still quite close to the facts. Interestingly, there is a black helicopter scene when Beck is rescued from Camp 1 that is perhaps the best 'risky' helicopter scene I've seen in a movie. This scene almost doesn't belong to the movie, but rather to a Hollywood production. Still, it is awesome. And the cherry on the sundae is this scene is close to the facts. The helicopter that rescued Becks is exactly as the one in the film, and only one passenger was rescued at once because the heli had reached the lift limit.