In “Everest,” climbers are shown trudging past the frozen corpses of the mountain’s previous victims, some 200 of whom remain along the route to the top of the world’s highest peak. We also see them walking past fellow climbers who are vomiting blood.
And that’s just during the dry runs — the preliminary, partial ascents in which high-altitude mountaineering enthusiasts acclimatize themselves to the cold temperatures and thin oxygen in the weeks before they attempt the summit. Things don’t get better, only bigger, more in-your-face and more stomach-churning in director Baltasar Kormákur’s dramatization of the 1996 disaster that claimed eight lives on Mount Everest. Filmed in Imax 3-D, the movie is an orgy of suffering, a powerfully affecting experience that you feel with your gut more than with your emotions.
I’m not sure whether that is a good thing, or whether the feeling constitutes enjoyment. Even if you didn’t know the outcome of the controversial climb — which involved too many competing commercial expeditions, hubris, judgment lapses, bad weather and communications failures — the movie plays out like a foregone conclusion as things move from bad to worse with the steady, dirgelike drumbeat of a funeral march.
There are movies about hair-raising exploits that end well, but this isn’t one of them. A foreshadowing of doom hangs over the film like the bulge of glacial ice that came crashing down from Everest’s West Shoulder last year, killing 16 sherpas.
“Everest” focuses mainly on two of the many teams that were being led up the mountain 19 years ago: one captained by New Zealander Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), a by-the-book guide, and the other by American Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), a long-haired mountain hippie with a more laid-back attitude.
Although the screenplay, by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, makes a perfunctory effort to turn the characters into people we can care about, that falls by the wayside of this tale, which is more concerned with missing rope lines and empty oxygen canisters. It’s an impressively technical film, with a visceral impact, that is not interested in — or at least not capable of — moving the audience deeply, despite side stories about Hall’s pregnant wife (Keira Knightley) or the schoolkids back home who are rooting for the mailman.
