 Everest (1998) The IMAX feature Everest will be something of a disappointment to fans of Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air, his gripping account of a storm on Everest that killed several climbers a few years back. Not fully effective as history, drama, or documentary, Everest is such a beautiful spectacle visually that it seems pointless to ask more from it than to just show us the mountain, as Cuba Gooding would say. I mean, these movies are basically geared toward people on a field trip from junior high, so dwelling too much on the terrifying elements of climbing Everest wouldn't really serve the purpose here. Clocking in at about 50 minutes, the film ostensibly follows a trio of climbers making their summit attempt on Everest. Given the short running time (and expense of filming with IMAX equipment), not too much in the way of character development is provided: you have the hardcore outdoor adventurer type, the incomprehensibly strong Spanish woman, and the Tibetan Sherpa whose father made the historic first ascent with Edmund Hillary. So the motivations are, respectively: it's the ultimate conflict of man vs. nature, it's the supreme test of human strength and endurance, and it's a totemic personal voyage in the shadow of one's geneology. This way, you "care" when they finally conquer the mountain. The film breezes over some of the more harrowing passages of the mountain early on in the climb, perhaps to emphasize the near-impossibility of the upper sections, so people unfamiliar with the climb (vividly depicted in Krakauer's book and a few others) won't get a tremendously accurate feel for the accomplishment of summitting Everest. Still, the bulk of the climb is depicted with remarkable viscerality and the expected IMAX dizziness-inducement. The footage on Everest is just amazing to see; this really is the perfect type of project for IMAX to have taken on (I mean, whales are great, but not quite so amazing, for some reason, as this big-ass mountain). In dealing with the tragedy that befalls the mountain, the film offers a fairly surprising perspective: that the storm was essentially a big pain in the ass for the film crew, who were not part of the teams that made the ill-fated summit attempt when the storm hit, and who almost had to abort the (massively expensive) film when it did, to help out the victims. It's kind of a weird moral issue, not unlike whether to help or heckle a fat guy you see getting carjacked. But it is interesting to see the three main climbers deal with the grief of deciding to continue even after the deaths occur; it is the most emotionally real moment in the movie. The biggest draw, of course, is the 90-seconds of footage taken at the summit itself, which is as breathtaking and as non-revelatory as it probably should be, reminding us (or me, at least) that even a task as monumental as scaling the world's tallest mountain doesn't really get us anywhere, similar to landing a man on the moon or forming a rock band in the 12th dimension. One weird aspect that didn't seem weird to anyone else was that of all the music the filmmakers could have chosen to convey the grandeur and enormity of conquering Everest, they used "Here Comes the Sun" by George Harrison (Harrison's music features prominently throughout, actually: orchestral versions of his pop hits, mainly). This confused me quite a lot, as it seems like there would be lots of potential songs that might better serve that purposebut in retrospect I suppose it's better than them using "When We Was Fab."
Review by Filipino Julie |