“Everest” Loses Its Footing Despite Looking Great

A great mystery of mankind is why we feel the desire to tackle the impossible, to face off against a challenge that few, if any, men or women could surmount. Why do people climb Mount Everest? The familiar adage, courtesy of Edmund Hillary, is “because it’s there,” but such a glib reply can’t possibly encapsulate our urge to conquer the forbidding unknown. Unfortunately, as impressively mounted as it is, the new film Everest doesn’t do much better at answering this question, even though the main characters are asked point-blank at one point why they want to scale the snowy face of Everest in spite of all logic and reason. By the end of the film, this much is true: Mount Everest is a terrifying and clearly dangerous place, and yet people keep coming back. Because it’s there.

Based on the 1996 tragedy documented by Jon Krakauer in the book Into Thin Air, Everest focuses mainly on the Adventure Consultants expedition led by experienced climber Rob Hall (Jason Clarke, finally allowed to use his native Australian brogue for once). Hall has traversed Everest before and knows the risks, but the expedition he’s leading seems fairly standard-issue, with a motley crew of people joining him, from good-ol’-Texas-boy Beck (Josh Brolin) to self-proclaimed “regular guy” Doug (John Hawkes) to Krakauer himself (Michael Kelly). Once Hall’s group reaches base camp, he discovers that many other expeditions, including one led by friendly rival Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), are headed up to the Everest summit as well at the exact same time. But crowding becomes a minor issue when a nasty blizzard heads for the mountain while all the groups are climbing far beyond help.

Director Baltasar Kormákur is best known in the United States for his B-movie actioners with Mark Wahlberg, such as Contraband and 2 Guns, but he brings a straightforward, meat-and-potatoes style of shooting to this epic-scale drama. In spite of the ensemble cast, the best thing about this movie is the visual element. (Fun fact: for its first week of release, Everest is only being screened in IMAX 3D, which is curious, seeing as the film was shot neither in IMAX nor 3D.) Kormákur excels less at vertiginous shots—there are a handful of these, but not as many as you might expect considering the setting—than at incorporating real-life mountain-climbing with effects. One early scene where Brolin’s character struggles to walk across a gap in the mountain via sideways ladders is the rare moment when the CG effects are obvious. A film like this requires a level of almost tactile authenticity when depicting people journeying up such a high, implacable peak, and does so mostly well.

Unfortunately, any shots of Hall’s or Fischer’s groups climbing up Everest are interspersed with things like dialogue and character arcs, both of which are sorely lacking. It’s a shame, because with actors like Clarke, Hawkes, Gyllenhaal, Brolin, Emily Watson (as a base-camp supervisor), Keira Knightley and Robin Wright (the latter two as a couple of climbers’ concerned wives hovering by their phones constantly), Everest shouldn’t be wanting for memorable performances. The script by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, however, seems content to be as one-dimensional as possible. Beck’s trait is that he’s from Texas; Doug’s is being driven by wanting to prove to kids in his town that regular folks can achieve the impossible; Scott’s is being laid-back and easygoing; Rob’s is putting others’ safety before his own. No doubt, the real-life men (and, with the exception of an American journalist and a Japanese mountaineer, they’re all men) from this expedition were complex and multi-layered individuals. Here, they’re boiled down to a single essence, which eliminates a great deal of tension or interest.

Once things get truly deathly—with roughly 40 minutes to go—Everest’s pacing ramps up, as does a growing sense of uncontrolled chaos. Kormákur’s ability to stage coherent action evaporates into thin air; each climber’s face is covered by oxygen masks and scarves, making it so we can only identify them by the color of their bulky winter coats, most of which are obscured in the storm. Oddly, as the blizzard intensifies, Everest loses all capacity for suspense. There are a few powerful moments amidst the insanity—Knightley may be stuck on the phone the whole time, but her last scene is a standout—but the film loses its way as quickly as the climbers lose their footing.