If you’re the kind of person who looks at photographs of mountaineers buried up to their waists in snow, fumbling with ropes and carabinas just a slip from certain death, and thinks ‘why bother?’, then Everest is probably not the film for you.
This imposing true-life survival thriller, about the catastrophic blizzard that claimed the lives of eight climbers and guides on the world’s mightiest peak in 1996, is unstinting in its efforts to make you feel as if you’re really there, scrabbling for safety, when disaster blows in on the wind.
But it’s also because the film seems strangely incurious about what actually drives its characters to haul themselves up to the roof of the world, lungs aching and toes blackening, just for a chance to be there, breathe thin air, and see the view of views.
Much like the mountain itself, the story of Everest is presented as a brute, uncircumnavigable fact. Numerous characters make their way up the rock, each with their own lightly sketched motivation and colour-coded jacket. Like the disaster movies of old, it’s an ensemble film. The closest it has to a main character is Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), whose tour company Adventure Consultants started running commercial expeditions up the mountain in the early Nineties.
By the time the film begins, Everest is a serious tourist hotspot, and the heavier foot traffic is slowing the ascent and increasing wear and tear on the equipment. In one hair-raising early sequence, a ladder across a gorge shakes loose, leaving Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), a garrulous Texan, clinging on for dear life.
The director, Baltasar Kormakúr, stages the scene with a swooping, swirling camera and use of 3D that makes the screen yawn like an open pit: it reminds you of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, though oddly it’s one of only a handful of sequences in the film that could be described as spectacle.
Everest should have been a great landscape film – the mountain looks by turns like a silty ocean floor and the sulphurous crust of an alien planet – but Kormákur’s camera is frustratingly reluctant to linger on any particular view of it for long, preferring to hunker down with the cast as they inch up the rock. Perhaps that’s why Everest lacks the vital sense of you-are-there terror mustered by films like Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (which was co-written by one of Everest’s co-writers, Simon Beaufoy): it never quite gives you a vivid enough sense of where "there" is.
Instead, the film’s main point of contact with its audience is the eminently sensible Rob – as the script is at pains to point out, his job isn’t to take people up the mountain, it’s to bring them down again – and Clarke does a fine job of making pragmatism and dependability into compelling movie-hero traits. (The swaggering is mostly left to Jake Gyllenhaal, resplendent in yak beard and man bun, as rival tour operator Scott Fischer.)
Both the Sherpas and female characters are conspicuously less well-rounded. Emily Watson puts in a strong shift as Base Camp’s mother hen, but as Rob’s anxiously pregnant wife back home in New Zealand, Keira Knightley spends 95 percent of her screen time ashen-facedly whispering into a cordless phone, and as Brolin’s equally sidelined spouse, Robin Wright almost hits the full 100.
Over the last ten years, Kormákur has successfully moved between smaller projects in his native Iceland and larger, Hollywood productions like Contraband and 2 Guns, and though you sense he’s on the edge of some kind of breakthrough, Everest isn’t quite it.
“Because it’s there” works as a mountaineering philosophy – and it’s repeatedly quoted in the film – but cinema can’t settle for that. We have to be there too. For all its frozen grandeur, Everest’s chill never quite makes the leap from the screen into your bones.
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