Intense Everest shows high price of glory

The new docudrama Everest opens with a startling statistic: From 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to stand upon the world’s highest point, to 1993, one in every four climbers attempting to reach the famous Himalayan summit died. Many left behind spouses and children.

The film (rated PG-13 for intense peril and disturbing images) begins in late March 1996, when 20 different international teams converge at base camp to prepare for an early May attempt to reach the summit. Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), whose wife (Keira Knightly) is home pregnant with their first child, runs Adventure Consultants. He charges $65,000 per head to lead climbers up the slopes of Mount Everest.

Even the experienced climbers must undergo six weeks of training, including three acclimatizing partial ascents, to build up the stamina necessary to reach 29,028 feet. “Human beings aren’t built to function at the cruising level of a 747. At that altitude, our bodies will literally be dying,” Hall reminds his clients.

On the night before the ascent, journalist Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly), who is accompanying Hall’s team on the climb to the peak, asks each team member why he or she is making the climb. Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), a mailman, wants to prove a regular guy can do it. Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), who has a wife and children in Texas, feels free of depression only when he’s climbing. Yasuko Namba (Naoko Mori) is shooting for her seventh Everest summit. Adventure Consultants camp operations manager Helen Wilton (Emily Watson) hopes under her breath it’s “not another year without a client at the top.”

The mass of climbers bottlenecks at tight passes, slowing the May 10 ascent. With little warning, a fast-moving storm descends like an icy typhoon on the mountain. Stubborn ambition trumps time-tested safety precautions. Eight climbers never make it back to camp; many of their bodies remain on Everest to this day.

In Imax 3D, narrow ledges clutch vertical walls, craggy boulders jut out into the ether, and deep crevices open wide their mouths. Viewers grasp—almost first-hand—that survival often depends on a single strand of cord or a half dozen aluminum ladders latched together, a skeletal path bridging a glacial abyss. Distant camera shots show the climbers for what they are—helpless and insignificant fleas tiptoeing across an angry behemoth that “makes its own weather.”

Often away from family for months, extreme climbers put their lives on the line, but not for the same reasons emergency responders and military personnel do so. Everest will leave many viewers contemplating the price of glory. For what does it profit a man if he gains the top of the world but loses his soul?