Cecil says: I saw a TV documentary of this story a year or so ago, though it took me a few minutes into the film to realise that this film was based on the same ‘true-story’.
I have always held a fascination for Everest climbers, though
actually less so since the whole experience became so commercialised and opened
up to every Jack or Jill who fancies doing it. And that is really what this
film is all about: the disaster struck because there were just too many
organised groups attempting to reach the summit at the same time.
We focus mainly on the group led by experienced New
Zealander Rob, who has climbed Everest lots of times and earns a living from
taking groups up every year.
He is portrayed as the most professional of the group
leaders on the mountain that year, and yet as the group hits bad weather and
disaster strikes, he makes decisions that are based on emotion and
sentimentality rather than professionalism. That is what is left over for me at
the end of the film – sure, in many ways the group was unlucky, but – without
wanting to do a spoiler on the film – why did Rob make one decision in
particular that would cost him so fundamentally?
What I didn’t like about the film was the boring formulaic
way all American films of this type – see Apollo 13, for example – have to go
domestic, and while our heroes are in difficulty up in space or up a mountain,
we are shown the everyday life (why does it always involve pouring cereal???)
of his (always he, isn’t it?) family back home. It’s no doubt supposed to
trigger the emotional empathy in us, but it’s just such a cliché now, it simply
annoyed me.
Emily Watson was good in a very Emily-Watson-style (I really
must one day go to see Wish You Were Here, the film in the 1980s that launched
her – surely there she can’t have played the same sort of Mumsy character);
Keira Knightly had a relatively small role for Keira Knightly.
I did enjoy the mountain scenes. They seem to have been
filmed partly in Nepal and partly in Italy (too dangerous and costly to go up
Everest to film, though the mountaineer friends we went with did say there were
genuine images of Everest in the film).
But, actually, I’d far rather
see a film about the two climbers who first got me interested in Everest:
Murray and Irvine. These are the guys who got way up high in 1924 without
oxygen and may even have made it to the summit, but died on their way down. Now
that would make a great film, and I’m sure we’d get no kids back home eating
cereal with them! But because it’s not a story in the public eye nowadays, nobody
would put the money up to make it. Such a shame.
***
Bea says: : I also enjoyed the
mountain scenes, and the fleeting views of Kathmandu, and I enjoyed watching
the struggle for survival – in terms of enjoying the drama, and imagining
myself in that situation and what I would have done. Like Cecil, I hope I would have stuck much
more strongly to the time schedule, and paid attention to weather reports.
In reality although I don’t mind either cold or altitude, I
have a horror of heights so I don’t think I’d be ideally suited to go up
Everest, and what the film of course brings home is that actually, very few
people are really experienced enough to climb the mountain, and all they do is
endanger everyone else of they do, experienced guide or no.
I did however say to Cecil that if he had been stuck above
the ice flow, I also would have sent in a helicopter for him… so he could come
home and pour his cereal in the morning with me.
Action packed, might be a bit of an emotional one if you’ve
lost anyone climbing.
***
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