Everest - an epic adventure with a heart of darkness

The visually stunning Everest takes a genre that tends towards macho excess – like Cliffhanger, for example – and lends it an air of gravitas and distinction.

It doesn’t always come off but for the most part this film succeeds as high adventure, but with an air of melancholy at its core.

Mountaineering movies tend to be about physical supremacy and the triumph of man over nature, Everest is different in that its calling cards are hubris, incompetence, and ultimate catastrophe. The film is based on the 1996 summer assault on the world’s highest peak which ended in what was until recently the worst tragedy in almost 100 years of attempting to climb Everest.

The primer for this story is Into Thin Air by adventure journalist Jon Krakauer who was on the climb and is played in the film by Michael Kelly. It’s a terrific book which Hollywood has been trying to adapt for a while; I suspect the controversy over the apportioning of blame and the subsequent risk of lawsuits has prevented a movie based solely on Krakauer’s work. This film takes that book, several others, and survivor interviews to present a more even-handed account.

Of course there are still moments when we will never know what happened; when a man on his own falls of a mountain and no one is there to see it we can only conjecture. Even so William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy have constructed a good script in difficult circumstances. This script is about driving the narrative of a story that has around a dozen principal characters; it can’t dwell on nuance on motivation too much but it does a good job of moving the story along.

With so many characters casting is a challenge but director Baltasar Kormakur has chosen wisely here. There are no superstars in this cast but with the likes of Jason Clarke, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Hawkes, Josh Brolin, Sam Worthington and others he has recognisable faces which are important to the audience in picking their way through a complex storyline. Cleverly the characters are also effectively colour-coded for ease of identification; a variation on a theme used by William Goldman in A Bridge Too Far where military units are identified to the audience by the star commanding them.

The female roles are interesting too. In terms of screen time they are tiny but in terms of the story they are absolutely pivotal. Each of the women involved is remarkable in her own way and the casting of Keira Knightley, Robin Wright Penn, and Emily Watson means they don’t get lost in testosterone and their contribution is honoured.

The expectation of Everest, and this is fed by a misleading trailer campaign, is of a disaster movie where most of the fun is spent in working out the order in which the cast will die. There is much more to the film than that, I think.

They do acknowledge the ill-fated George Mallory’s quote about why people try to climb Everest – ‘because it’s there’, the most famous three words in mountaineering. But there is an attempt at something more.

I was impressed by the film’s spiritual undertones. There is a strong subtext of religious ritual running through the film which leaves the suggestion that perhaps these men and women are sacrifices to the mountain. Some have to die so that others are spared and this is a compact into which they enter willingly. That said the film is not a total downer and it manages a note of, if not triumph, then at least validation towards the end.

I found Everest to be totally compelling. It is also deeply affecting. Not just as an epic adventure but as an emotional experience; it would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the conversations between Clarke and Knightley. But nothing is quite so moving as the final piece of archive footage over the end credits.

The script may tend towards the functional but the visuals are terrific. It is an over-used phrase but Salvatore Totino’s cinematography is breath-taking and combines excitement with a sense of majesty. His work makes Everest one of those rare films that demands to be seen in 3-D if only to comprehend the sheer scale of the venture.

Because 'Be completely indifferent to the Walking Dead' just doesn't work....

Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis

The first episode of Fear the Walking Dead was a bit short on both of its titular attractions; there wasn’t a lot of fear and even less walking dead.

This is supposed to be a prequel to The Walking Dead which will outline what happened to turn the bulk of the world’s population into zombies. But here’s the thing; I don’t care. When I watched The Walking Dead – which I did until about midway through season three – I wasn’t much bothered about why the Walkers were there. It only mattered that they were.

It’s a genre trope in zombie movies. The reasons for the epidemic are seldom revealed, or if they are usually only in radios playing in the background. What is important is that someone wakes up one morning and discovers everyone but them has a taste for brains.

In this case the luckless person is Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) who wakes up from a stoner party to discover everyone else dead except his girlfriend who he discovers chewing the face off another party guest.

Nick makes his escape, runs out into the road, gets hit by a car and ends up in hospital. Cue his mother (Kim Dickens), his stepfather (Cliff Curtis), and assorted siblings bickering at the bottom of his hospital bed. They are a blended family having trouble with the blending. Conveniently Dickens and Curtis are teachers at the same high school which means they can spend pretty much the whole episode talking about their family troubles. In between times others comment on the increasing absenteeism because of a mysterious ‘flu’ going around.

And that’s about it until near the end which Nick encounters another Walker. So, one zombie show features exactly two zombies – three if you count the one we see on a TV news clip.

One of the reasons I stopped watching The Walking Dead was that it was essentially like watching Wagon Train but much slower because they weren’t really going anywhere. Using that same analogy Fear the Walking Dead is like watching Emmerdale; it’s essentially a soap but with nowhere near the sense of foreboding that it should have.

I don’t accept the notion of this being a slow burner; you don’t have the luxury of a slow burn in this media landscape, you need to grab an audience from the get-go. This show is just plain dull. In addition the acting is dreadful; the last time I saw anything this wooden it was stirring my porridge.

The creator of The Walking Dead comic book Robert Kirkman has been pretty adamant that he doesn’t want to come up with reason for the plague and I am perfectly fine with that. We don’t need to know why there are zombies, we just need to know how society is coping. On that basis Fear the Walking Dead brings precisely nothing to the party. Given that the USP of The Walking Dead is wall to wall zombies, why would anyone want to see something with fewer zombies?

It’s rather like the equally underwhelming Better Call Saul in the sense that if the original show hadn’t contributed a halo effect then neither of these spin-offs would have been commissioned. If you pitched the idea for Better Call Saul or Fear the Walking Dead in isolation, you would be lucky not to feel the door handle in the small of your back pretty smartly. These are shows which, for me, appear only to have been commissioned because of who is pitching them and not what’s being pitched.

Do I fear the Walking Dead? Not even remotely. Even so, you couldn’t pay me to watch the next episode.

45 Years...and I felt every minute

Tom Courtenay & Charlotte Rampling

In my blog on The Man from UNCLE a few weeks ago I took exception to  Guy Ritchie’s hyper-active directorial style. He never lets you forget he’s there, he’s always doing something to remind you that he’s in charge. That’s a bad thing. Andrew Haigh, writer and director of 45 Years, is the very opposite. There are times when you would never know that he’s there but that is not necessarily a good thing.

Geoff and Kate, played by Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, are about to celebrate their 45^th wedding anniversary with a bit of a do. Geoff and Kate have no children but they have a wide circle of friends and, even though they are not the partying type, the event is being marked by a big celebration.

Five days before the party, in a plot twist that would be hilarious if everyone didn’t take it so seriously, Geoff gets a letter to say the body of his late German former girlfriend has been recovered. She fell down an Alpine crevasse 45 years earlier and has been frozen in the ice ever since; now, presumably thanks to climate change, she has put in an appearance again.

Geoff had told Kate about his previous lover, he thinks, but evidently he didn’t tell her everything. In the days leading up to the party Kate is riven by doubt both about the extent of Geoff’s previous relationship and the validity of their own relationship. Does he love her? Did he ever? Is he telling her the whole truth?

The answer to this last question would appear to be no after she roots around in the attic and discovers some slides of the dead woman. Matters appear to be building to a climax at the party, and then they don’t. The film doesn’t end so much as lurch to a halt.

To be honest 45 Years isn’t a film at all. It’s a novella masquerading as a film; it is a story where everything happens internally and the worst place in the world to place a camera is inside a character’s head. We are given few clues about the nature of Kate and Geoff’s relationship prior to this week so it is impossible to gauge just how devastating or otherwise the news should be.

This lack of filmic quality extends to the visual aspect, not least in the choice of a dull palette of muddy greens and browns. Apart from the heavy handed metaphor of a plot device frozen in time – just like Geoff, geddit? - Andrew Haigh breaks his film up with endless medium-long shots of the Norfolk broads which are not only visually uninteresting but narratively useless. You could of course argue that the flat, unchanging landscape is another of his heavy-handed metaphors but I am choosing not to go there.

I read an interview with Haigh in which he said he preferred not to rehearse with his actors too much and directed with a light touch. The result is a succession of long takes in which Courtenay and Rampling pretty much appear to direct themselves; this is the very opposite of what Ritchie does. This is just stuff happening in front of a camera and being captured for the screen. There is no attempt to vary the pace or create a dramatic arc for any of the characters. They seem like two characters in different movies.

The performances are fine, how could they not be with these two? However there are actors who are very good at letting the audience see them think – Kevin Spacey leaps to mind – but neither Courtenay nor Rampling do this. Consequently there is no emotional heart to this film. It is the job of the director to find the emotional core of the story, protect it, and communicate it to the audience. Haigh, in my opinion, has singularly failed to do that.

He can argue he is going for naturalism, maybe in the style of Ozu, Bergman, or Mike Leigh who are no strangers to long unchanging scenes. They however have layered their scenes with emotion and depth of characterisation which is absent here and without that I really didn’t care about either Geoff or Kate.

I’m not arguing for helicopter chases or fight scenes but there is no drama here, or at least none that the audience can share. And with no drama there is just, as I say, stuff happening in front of a camera.