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.