I can honestly say, that after watching Everest, that Climbing this infamous mountain will never be on a bucket list of mine!
Based on a true story about the 1994 expedition lead by Rob Hall of Adventure Consultants. A group of mountaineers and enthusiasts take on the climb to the summit but a perfect storm threatens their descent. Everest takes the viewer on a journey with the explorers through the journey to base camp and upwards to the peak, through the varying, unpredictable weather conditions and across very dodgy rope and ladder set ups that you would question at much lower heights and not expect to be traversing bottomless caverns. It is an emotional journey as one would expect, when you find out at the start of the film that Keira Knightley's role is pregnant you can only expect heart strings to be yanked.
My only critisisms with the film primarily with the pacing which seems to take you on the full journey from the airport to base camp through villages of increasing altitude and monestry enroute and then skips forward missing much of the camp 1 and camp 2 expeditions. It feels as though there have been some heavy edits to reduce down run time, either that or nothing much happened in those camps and the director just thought to skip them. Secondly, with the weather conditions becoming more and more severe the higher the altitude the intrepid climbers wear more and more clothing, masks, eye covers and big jackets which in turn makes it harder to distinguish who is who, it just looks like a Teletubbie outing. When any incident happens, I was unsure who it was happening too and just had to remember coat colours in the end, characters became known to me as Tinky Winky, La La, Po and Jake Gylenhaal (because he had a funky hat on he was easier to spot).
Knowing this was a true story gave the film more gravitas to the treacherous journey, but with the big names involved (Josh Brolin, Jake Gylenhaal, Jason Clarke) it left you with a sense of wonder, are these people going to make it back down or are they destined to remain a permanent resident of Everest?
Everest was full of amazing vistas and heart stopping moments, in one scene involving a helicopter and thin air, I think I stopped breathing for a good five minutes. One thing is for sure, I felt like I climbed the mountain with them and have no intentions of doing it for myself.
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