Everest **½ (2015, Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emily Watson, Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington, Robin Wright) – Movie Review

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (The Deep, Two Guns) tells the old, old tale of man going up against mountain and coming up against a huge obstacle. But what is the story?

His 1996 real-life scenario (in a screenplay by experts William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy) doesn’t have a story, only a situation and a resolution. Men take on the world’s highest mountain and lose. It doesn’t even seem to have a point either.

Though it gets its motley characters to discuss why they’re risking their climbing Everest – because it’s there – and seems to be saying they’re wrong to take such risks, though maybe somehow commendably heroic in their foolishness. It’s hard to tell what attitude it has to this. The film doesn’t seem to want to apportion any blame for the catastrophe, for whatever reasons.

Jason Clarke stars as Rob Hall, the glum leader of a rich folks’ climbing expedition on Mount Everest that is devastated by a severe snow storm. Though it’s a true story, it has the advantage of being little known, so most people won’t know the outcome. And it can play like a Seventies disaster movie, like Poseidon Adventure or Towering Inferno, where the fun it trying to guess who’ll die next and who will survive to the end credits. But this is a true story, remember, and a real grim one, so there’s not much fun to be had here, except for ghouls who like to stare at road accidents.

A number of rich, older blokes have paid a lot of money for a high-risk adventure holiday. Things start going wrong pretty fast, like in Jurassic Park, except without the dinosaurs. Everest is of course the monster here.

The film’s characters are under-characterised, one-dimensional movie folk, giving a bunch of good actors a lot of problems. There’s something wrong when Jake Gyllenhaal and Josh Brolin are dull, one just there to be weirdly quirky, the other just to suffer. Clarke is one of the world’s least expressive actors, so that doesn’t help, but he is quite convincing as the manly man in charge. What quite the film’s attitude to his central character is, however, I’m not sure.

The women’s parts are terrible – they are there just to suffer at home, with Keira Knightley and Robin Wright looking pained and upset as bad news comes in. Clarke and Knightley don’t seem very convincing as a married couple, with him seeming to come from a different planet from her. However Emily Watson has a decent role that she sparks up really well as the concerned company woman at the radio controls. And Sam Worthington helps out, too, as her co-worker Guy Cotter.

On the plus side, the film is brilliantly staged and gives what seems like a very real impression of what life on an unforgiving mountain must be like. There’s a strong sense of scary realism that makes the movie.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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