Certainly stunning to look at, this film about a 1996 trek to the top of Mount Everest really shows the narcissism involved in most of the participants, risking their lives simply just to get their name onto the list of survivors or on the list of the hundreds being mourned. If anything, this film is a deterrent from making the journey and the risk, especially when the group passes by a few corpses that did not make it an obvious slid down only to die of their wounds or other unnatural causes.
An all-star cast (Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Robin Wright, Kiera Knightley among them) play the participants in this journey or their family members, worried about them from afar. You can see the motivations for pretty much all of the characters, some honorable and brave but others rather cocky and egotistical. Every time a potential disaster hits, I would say to myself, "If that was me, I would die", and fortunately, these incidents for the most part seem to be presented realistically and when a tragedy does happen, it is shocking and vicious as nature can be sometimes.
You get to see a little bit of the Indian culture as the group travels to the slopes far out of the city, and even from a distance, the range looks seriously dangerous. Nature is unpredictable, and when wind storms and avalanches and other natural events take place, there's no escaping it. I was feeling queasy just watching the people cross over the very high up pedestrian bridge above a gorge, and having done some hiking on much smaller mountain ranges, my fear was real knowing how I panicked even trying to get across a gorge in the Hollywood Hills at Runyeon Canyon let alone a bunch of miles above sea level.
Fortunately so, the film does not go to deep into the personal lives of these characters because that would be distracting and take away from the real issues they face. There's no sentimentality here at all and that is a very good thing. It is that directness within the script that eventually has everybody working together to make sure as many people as possible is able to get down and back home. So I can say while I did not like all of the characters, eventually I did begin to root for them even though my initial Impressions were not so great.
The photography is stunning, and the action during the storm sequences is nail biting. Discussions of how the brain adapts unsuccessfully to the change in oxygen level does bring on some shocking sequences including someone coughing up blood. This is a type of film where the viewer is perfectly content either sitting in a comfortable seat in the movie theater or on their own couch, and anybody who has the inclination to want to try this may be easily convinced otherwise after seeing it.
An all-star cast (Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Robin Wright, Kiera Knightley among them) play the participants in this journey or their family members, worried about them from afar. You can see the motivations for pretty much all of the characters, some honorable and brave but others rather cocky and egotistical. Every time a potential disaster hits, I would say to myself, "If that was me, I would die", and fortunately, these incidents for the most part seem to be presented realistically and when a tragedy does happen, it is shocking and vicious as nature can be sometimes.
You get to see a little bit of the Indian culture as the group travels to the slopes far out of the city, and even from a distance, the range looks seriously dangerous. Nature is unpredictable, and when wind storms and avalanches and other natural events take place, there's no escaping it. I was feeling queasy just watching the people cross over the very high up pedestrian bridge above a gorge, and having done some hiking on much smaller mountain ranges, my fear was real knowing how I panicked even trying to get across a gorge in the Hollywood Hills at Runyeon Canyon let alone a bunch of miles above sea level.
Fortunately so, the film does not go to deep into the personal lives of these characters because that would be distracting and take away from the real issues they face. There's no sentimentality here at all and that is a very good thing. It is that directness within the script that eventually has everybody working together to make sure as many people as possible is able to get down and back home. So I can say while I did not like all of the characters, eventually I did begin to root for them even though my initial Impressions were not so great.
The photography is stunning, and the action during the storm sequences is nail biting. Discussions of how the brain adapts unsuccessfully to the change in oxygen level does bring on some shocking sequences including someone coughing up blood. This is a type of film where the viewer is perfectly content either sitting in a comfortable seat in the movie theater or on their own couch, and anybody who has the inclination to want to try this may be easily convinced otherwise after seeing it.