Everest Review | The mountain wins but movie fails to scale the summit
Watching this movie leaves the viewer in no doubt that the hero of this movie is Mt. Everest.Everest is by no means what would be called an entertainment film. The mountain is brutal in real life and similarly is reflected in this movie. The opening few texts take care of business and get us right into how mountain-climbing, an activity for highly trained explorers transformed into an Adventure tourism. Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) is the man in charge of one such company called Adventure Consultants. Rob leads one such expedition in the summer of 1996 leaving his pregnant wife Jan Hall (Keira Knightley) behind in New Zealand. The story is based on a real-life tragedy during
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Things go wrong and if the weather turns bad it can cause havoc. As viewers, we’re left with the feeling of wanting to scream at the characters to turn around and not go further as events unfold which seals the climbers’ doom. Comparisons to one of the all time disaster movies Titanic are inevitable, though here Director Baltasar Karmakur fails in his attempt for the audience to connect with the character, though he does his best to wrangle the huge character sets. It was at times difficult to keep track of who’s who as the climbing gear often masked the face and muffled their voices. The screenplay is crisp in its writing and the movie moves along briskly as it hits all the beats with precision, though it suffers from under-developed characters and often at times using scenes which lead to nowhere.
Baltasar and the writers Mark Medoof, Simon Beaufoy & Justin Isbell handicapped the movie from reaching its summit and figured the awe-inspiring spectacle of Everest and its visual would carry the film. We are left with a bit of a disappointment that the film could have been more. The movie is a definite watch for the visuals which transport you to the top of the world. Overall a finely made film but little care in handling and it would have surely got this film to the summit it set out to