Review of Everest (2015) by Nascent — 29 Sep 2015

I found it a fairly bland disaster film personally.

I found the first half hour was a poor way to introduce characters, and frankly found I didn't connect with any of them. I found that the film poorly demonstrated why it is that people will do silly things to summit and risk their lives. The characters barely had any backstory, and them trying to do such crazy things in the face of immediate danger wasn't expressed in a empathetic way. I felt as connected to the characters as I would to a character from a late 80s/early 90s slasher sequel. I couldn't empathise or understand why these people would do such stupidly obvious things. The loss of sanity caused by lack of oxygen, the hunger to summit against better judgement, none of this was portrayed well by the film for me.

I also found the film jumped around time frames poorly, and failed to show the actual struggle of the climb itself, skipping months of going between base camps and painstaking climbing, instead just showing you a few dangerous high-octane moments. It felt like the movie Jaws, if the ocean was the size of an Olympic Swimming pool, suspense was edited out of the film, and people were still trying to swim laps despite everyone telling them there's a shark coming towards them.

But, to each their own.