By You’ve seen Everist before. Not just in the sense that we’ve all seen a billion movies about mountains killing people or in the sense that it’s based on the same true story that Into Thin Air was based on. You’ve seen it before because it really does almost nothing new for the survival sub-genre. It pretends like it does, but really Everest is just every mountain climbing movie you’ve ever seen done over again.
That being said, it’s not the worst thing to watch again.
Everest is based on the real life events of what was then the deadliest day in the mountain’s history. A collection of poor decisions, freak occurrences and bad luck that led to the death of eight climbers in 1996. Famed climber Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) leads Everest climbing expeditions for groups of climbers, however, in their push for the summit they make a series of poor decisions and a dangerous storm catches them leading to the death of multiple people and daring rescues. I suppose some spoiler alerts should have gone there, but I think we’re well past the time limit for this story on those.
Interestingly the film is not based on Jon Krakauer’s (Michael Kelly) book, Into Thin Air, and ditches much of the editorializing that the book did about the issues with an overcrowded Everest making safety measures a concern. This is both a boon and a bane for the film. The loss of this commentary does mean that the film loses some of its punch. We’re never given an overall cause for the events of that day and so the movie can feel pointless in its story. On the flip side we’re allowed far more focus on the characters because commentary is removed. It ditches the why for the who and instead of placing blame focuses on the tragedy of the event. This is why, despite being redundant, the isn’t a failure.
I believe that part of what is supposed to be different about this film is that it’s in IMAX 3D. The sweeping vistas and digital recreations of Everest are definitely something to behold on a massive screen for sure, but not enough to excuse the fact that we’ve seen it all before. The movie does look great, but there’s legitimate IMAX Everest movies that look even better that anyone who has been to a natural history museum in the past 35 years has seen. We’ve also been flooded with disaster movies in this format so it’s getting harder and harder to make “Oooo pretty” into something worth putting your money down. As a selling point Everest‘s grandeur doesn’t really work.
Thankfully it doesn’t just rely on that, nor does it rely on being a disaster flick. While the movie ratchets up the action here and there it’s surprisingly more human focused. Aside from a bit in the middle when the storm hits the film is almost entirely character driven, focusing on the lives of these people and not their deaths. It’s a great move, especially with the actors they have. A film simply full of destruction would have felt cheap in the face of so much death. Instead we spend the majority of the opening finding out about the characters before we watch them slowly die on the mountain side. Emotionally Everest can pack a punch, and that’s where it stands out from the lesser survival films out there whose main focus is to put their characters into harrowing situations.
The cast is pretty all star (Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllyenhal, Keira Knightly, Sam Worthington and a bunch of “that guys”) so it stand to reason that they can handle the deeper stuff. Most of the emotional punch comes from the folks not climbing, though. It’s their reactions that hit you in the gut as they slowly listen to more and more climbers die. The ones on the mountain are covered in snow and winter coats so it means the guys on the ground are where we get the feeling from.
Everest may not be doing anything new, but it does a good enough job of nailing what has already been done. It looks gorgeous and piles on the drama instead of the action. While it might not be anything that’s going to change how you see survival movies it will reconfirm one thing: climbing a mountain is not something you want to do.
