Everest (the movie based on the 1996 disaster)

I went to see the movie last night, and I was wondering if anyone else had seen it. I’d been looking forward to seeing it, because I’d seen the trailers before some other movies, and the trailer looked exciting, and the movie has several actors I like, including Jason Clarke, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emily Watson, and John Hawkes.

I was hesitant to see it at first because it’s only in 3D IMAX, and I usually don’t want to pay extra for 3D, but seeing it on the big IMAX screen was worth it. It looked gorgeous.

It was pretty well done in setting things up, and showing some of the preparations that go into making the climb, and keeping things tense to the end. But there were some things I wish had been gotten more into. Like there’s a scene where Jon Krakauer asks some of the other climbers why they do it, when it costs so much time and money and relationships, but they mostly blow him off, and say the famous “because it’s there” line. Doug Hansen answers that it’s to inspire his kids, and the other kids at their school, and show that an ordinary person with a dream can do anything.

Then OPEN SPOILERS FOR REAL LIFE EVENTS FROM 20 YEARS AGO Hansen does make it to the summit, but by only going up after it was safe to do so, and after his guide Rob Hall said he shouldn’t. And then he died coming back down. Of course he could have still died if he had turned around earlier and not tried for the summit, but he would have had a much better chance. And Hall and another guide Andy Harris would have had a better chance, since they were where they were because of Hansen.

I’m not trying to speak ill of the dead, and of course hindsight is 20/20. But I couldn’t help but think what did Hansen’s kids think about his attempt. And what did the other kids at the school think. Especially because he said that the kids helped raise money for his expedition.

And I read one review saying that too much time of the movie was spent with the people not on the mountain, seeing Keira Knightley crying hoping her husband would come back. But I couldn’t help but be curious what Jan Arnold, Rob Hall’s wife thought. He says earlier that she’s a climber too, so she understands, but that seems easier to think before something terrible has happened.

And Beck Weathers, the brash Texan makes it down alive, but ends up losing his nose and hands. Did he think it was worth it, or did he regret trying? He says earlier that the only time he doesn’t feel a cloud of depression is on the mountain, so how does he feel now?

The movie can only be so long, so it focused on only certain things, and I realize the limitations. But I wish it could have been something more. I’ve watched movies and read books where people face terrible disasters, and have to fight to survive and not everyone makes it out alive, and it’s tense and exciting to watch the action stuff and I understand that. But for a lot of disaster stories, it’s unpredictable disasters, where people were going about their normal day and something terrible happened, like in the movie The Impossible, or the book Lost in Shangri-La. While the storms were unpredictable on Everest, something like one in four people who reach the summit do die. This wasn’t unpredictable disaster, it was disaster that they danced along side of. Not because they needed to, but because they wanted to reach the top of Everest. I think it would have been interesting to go into that a little more.

I know it’s based on a real life event and that there are several books written about it, I might read one of them now. Into Thin Air is of course the biggest one, but I know there are several others.

I haven’t seen it yet, probably going this weekend. I’m a big fan of Into Thin Air, although I understand the movie is not based on the book. Krakauer talks a lot about the commercialization of Everest and how it contributes to so many deaths. It doesn’t sound like the movie gets into that, which is too bad.

Into Thin Air was a great book. I’m a huge fan of Krakauer’s work. But it sounds like they made this into just another disaster movie. At least Into The Wild was visually striking, with good music and acting, even if it left out a lot of the motivation and background information. Sounds like this one is similar, pretty and well executed, but not as deep or complex as the book. I’ll probably give it a shot. Thanks for alerting me to the existence of this movie.

Anybody familiar with mountain climbing want to comment on how accurate that aspect is?

Slight hijack: I highly recommend the other current film about mountaineering: Meru. It’s not based on a true story, it’s the real thing.

Beck Weathers wrote a book on the aftermath he experienced: Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest The best summation I can come up with is “it’s complicated” but trying to distill a bit more from the book leads me to Weathers realizing he’d suffered from depressive symptoms for a long, long time which he masked via physical feats like mountain climbing. He has since found other ways to cope with such issues.

I’ve read Into Thin Air many, many, many times, so I know the basic facts of the story very well. I’ve also read dozens of other book about mountain climbing disasters (although not the other books about the 1996 Everest climb). I was really looking forward to this movie, although I wasn’t sure if it would capture what I love about the book.

From my perspective, the movie was brilliant. I feel like it told the story faithfully, without adding a lot of unnecessary drama (which is why some critics have accused it of not being very well plotted – even though the story is exciting, life doesn’t necessarily have a neat dramatic structure). But the best part was that with the 3D aspect, it really gave me a sense of what the climb was like. Toward the end, my teeth were chattering, and not just because of the AC in the theater. The movie focuses primarily on four people: Guides Rob Hall, Scott Fischer and Anatoli Boukreev, and client Beck Weathers. I could sense where elements were taken from Boukreev’s and Weathers’ books. Some key parts of Krakauer’s book are missing, and he is not a major character in the film. But overall I think it really gave a sense of what it is like to climb Everest. I’ve been thinking about whether I’d like to see it a second time.

The movie is available in both 3D IMAX and non-IMAX 3D (which is the way I saw it). One reason I’m thinking about going again is to see the IMAX version.

I’m glad he’s found a way to cope. I didn’t know the real life story, so I was sure he was dead, especially after he called his wife back home, it just seemed to be setting up his tragic end. I’m pretty sure I gasped when he woke up. I’m sure he has an interesting story, I might check his book out too.

I thought it was fairly well plotted, I liked the structure of the movie, with them arriving in Nepal, and going up to base camp, and going through the various temples and rituals, and all the things to prepare. And how some of the deaths were done, with Hansen and Harris basically falling off the mountain without big dramatic music or something like other movies could have done, it felt very realistic, like it must have actually been.

I had more of an issue with the characters not being well developed. You say that the movie focused on Hall, Fischer, Boukreev, and Weathers, but I could barely tell you anything about Fischer or Boukreev. I know from the movie that Fischer is a guide who had been there before and he’s a chill American dude, but I don’t know anything else about him, and the movie is not with him for much of the time. I don’t know why he pushed himself way further than he should have, even with Hall saying he didn’t sound good and should take more of a break. Was it because he felt obligated to his clients to get back up their with him, or was he just cocky and overconfident? Boukreev is barely a character in the movie. I remember he is shown saving or trying to save some people in the movie, and finds Fischer and covers him with his backpack. I don’t remember who he’s actually shown to have saved if it shows it in the movie, and it doesn’t mention it in the Wikipedia summary. I’d say that the movie focuses more on Doug Hansen or even Guy Cotter than Boukreev.

Also, I was wondering what the deal with the South Africans were. Earlier in the movie it takes a while to cross the ladder because of the South Africans, and in the meeting later one of them is angry when Hall says something about how it will be too crowded if everyone tries to ascend at once. So I was expecting one of them to accidentally contribute to some deaths, or to die tragically, or something significant, but I don’t remember seeing any of the South Africans at all during the summiting/disaster part of the movie.

I’m sure that my familiarity with *Into Thin Air *colored my perceptions, since I already know the background of the characters. I re-read the book last weekend after seeing the movie, and I highly recommend that you read it for a more complete picture (and also because it’s a truly amazing book).

*Into Thin Air *goes into a lot more detail about the South African expedition. Let’s just say that the expedition was extremely controversial (among other things, most of the experienced members of the expedition quit before the ascent of Everest, leaving only the less experienced ones). There was also a Taiwanese expedition on the mountain that caused even more problems than the South African one. The helicopter scene left out a dramatic moment in which the helicopter can only carry one passenger, but there are two who need to be evacuated (Beck Weathers and Taiwanese climber Makalu Gau). They actually decided to take Gau first, and the helicopter had to come back for Weathers.

Boukreev is a very controversial character in many of the depictions of what happened on the mountain in 96. Krakauer made an attempt to be fair to him in his book, but was still clear that there were disagreements about how Boukreev handled the climb and the resulting rescue period. I wonder if the movie, in an attempt to be unbiased, kept his role minimal on purpose?

I love Krakauer’s work and have read Into Thin Air more times than I can count, and I am REALLY looking forward to seeing this.

From my perspective, the movie definitely portrayed Boukreev as a hero of the disaster, which is why I think that at least some parts are based on his book The Climb.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, though I plan to. Dr. Weathers is from my neck of the woods (North Texas) so we got a fair bit of local coverage during the events.

One of the more interesting aspects of Dr. Weather’s recovery, and I don’t know if they have time to go into all of that in the movie, but surely they show that he loses his nose to frostbite, among other injuries.

Well, the plastic surgeons grew him a new nose right there on his forehead (no, really!) from cartilage harvested elsewhere on his body, and today, you’d never know. Barely any scars, totally normal and natural looking. He does look a little different than before, but they did an absolutely amazing job.

I believe he had to switch to being a pathologist, afterwards, due to having lost so much use of his hands. Although he may be approaching retirement age by now.

Pathology is a rather demanding specialty . Dr. Weathers was a pathologist prior to 1996. Having said that, many other specialties require hands…

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Saw the movie today. It broke my “Up” line for earliest time in a movie to cry, because I knew the story and the goodbye in the airport with Hall was just rough.

Basing some of this off Into Thin Air and other stuff I’ve read (just ordered Boukreev’s and Weathers’ books off Amazon).

Fischer is dealing with a minor intestinal illness through his time on Everest (that they keep referencing with him and hist bathroom breaks) that was sapping him of strength. Also, as he says to Hall, he isn’t a hand holder with his clients - Hall’s team stuck together pretty tightly on acclimitization climbs, but Fischer let his clients spread out more, which meant that he had to do more work to get them down safely when some came down with problems on the climbs (including the one pictured on the last trip up from base camp). There was also the pressure for both Mountain Madness and Adventure Consultants to get as many clients up as possible when there was a major magazine article being written, which may have lead to both making decisions that they wouldn’t have done at a different time.

Boukreev is the one who went out into the blizzard alone to rescue three of the climbers who had gotten lost on the South Col, getting Sandy Pittman (the satellite phone reporter), Tim Madsen and Charlotte Fox back to safety. As he said, he didn’t support using bottled oxygen, which meant he couldn’t do more than that astounding effort and meant Namba and Weathers were left for dead as he had assessed that neither of them would survive.

Interesting article in the LA Times: Jon Krakauer hates ‘Everest’

Very telling quote at the end: “When I say I wish I’d never gone, I really mean that.”

Eh. He doesn’t have much in the way of specific, substantive objections there. So one scene depicts a conversation that he says didn’t happen–which the filmmaker says was only meant to illustrate the circumstances, which Krakauer, in fact, agrees were the circumstances.

Now, if I were making or appearing in a film about a well-known, dramatic event, in which people died, I’d certainly ask any and all survivors if they’d be willing to talk to me about it. So, no point for thoroughness if the director, and the actor who played Krakauer, missed that opportunity with him.

On the other hand, a film like this could be told from the perspectives of any one or combination of the people who were there. Those of us who read his book may tend to think of Krakauer as a fairly central figure, but that doesn’t mean that telling the story from other perspectives–even inventing some details that are either unknown, or cinematic shorthand–is “bull.”

What’s interesting is that Krakauer wrote about the problematic high stakes commercial climbing culture in his “Bad Summer on K2”, documenting loss of climbers on K2 in 1986.

Then in 1996 he gets caught up in it on Everest.

I liked the movie, but it is impossible to really get at it without having read the books.

We watched it today. Good. The closest we’ve ever gotten to Mt. Everest was a flight around it out of Kathmandu. I think that’s enough for us.

Spotted a minor blooper in the film. This was supposed to be 1996, yes? I’m pretty sure Kathmandu didn’t have ATMs then. Certainly not any prominently displayed in the tourist quarter like in the film.

Somebody elsewhere pointed out that there wasn’t yet a Dole/Kemp campaign in May of 96.

That’s right! I didn’t even think of that.

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this movie. I finally saw it, in IMAX 3D. I’ve read Into Thin Air about 6-7 times, and I’ve also read these books:

Anatoli Boukreev, The Climb
Broughton Coburn, Everest, Mountain Without Mercy (with David Breashears, Ed Viesturs)
David Breashears, High Exposure: An Enduring Passion for Everest and Unforgiving Places

I think the movie was a pretty accurate portrayal of the events of Apr/May 1996. Sure, they didn’t get some things like the chopper rescue of Makalu Gau (minor ommission), the disagreements between Scott Fischer and Anatoli Boukreev about guiding without ocygen (not a minor ommission), and they showed Boukreev’s heroic attempts to save Fischer and the climbers huddled on the south col. But they could have emphasized the fact that Boukreev was home, safe and warm in his Camp IV tent while Scott Fischer and Neal Beidleman were out there with the clients, and their clients had not all safely returned.

The cinematography was very good, and I liked seeing the mountain details of the south col, Lhotse face, southeast ridge, south summit and Hillary Step.