Rating: The famous mantra of mountaineering is that getting to the summit is the easy part - the descent is where it gets deadly. Rather fittingly given its subject, Everest shows how the same is true of movies - setting up an exciting story is one thing, but the tricky part is successfully paying it off. The pitch is simple - a group of amateurs go to climb Everest during the mid-nineties boom in tourism to the Himalayas, only for things to go drastically wrong when a storm hits and they're left stranded with little oxygen. Or to put it another way, think Gravity on a mountain. That is definitely the pull quote the film's angling for. There's constant talk about how inhospitable the peak of Everest is, painfully reminiscent of Alfonso Cuarón's science faction - "life is impossible" and all that. But despite the shared concept, the movies themselves couldn't be more different in their approach; Everest is much more about the surrounding story than it is the actual rollercoaster experience of being in this inhabitable place. The advantage is a more well-rounded set of characters, but the pitfalls should be obvious - imagine if we started Gravity with Sandra Bullock first joining NASA, reducing the actual movie to its final third. So yeah, the first half of Everest is actually spent in the shadow of the Himalayan giant, which to the movie's credit works better than it sounds. There's a lot of characters and motivations and relationships to set up, as well as the imposing titular figure that looms over everyone. Mount Everest itself does look awesome, shot in sweeping wide shots and tight cliff-edge views, and particular care is taken to introducing audiences to the path of ascent ahead of time, setting up key points of tension for when things get deadly. Don't let anyone convince you Baltasar Kormákur has made the location a real "character" in its own right though - once we're actually up there the mountain just becomes a collection of connected vertical sets. In fact, it's as we climb up and things start to go wrong for the characters that the movie loses its way. You'd think a glorified disaster movie would put a lot of effort into, well, disaster, but for Everest it feels like an afterthought. Once the storm hits, the realistic vista shots are replaced with obvious CGI clouds and the juggling of characters that worked so well early on gets increasingly clumsy. Worst of all, deaths that are clearly meant to have an emotional impact are instead silly and sudden (no doubt accurate in the latter, but poorly done all the same). There just doesn't seem to be any attempt to work a narrative through this second half; Kormákur simply presents events in some vague order and then rolls the credits. Such sloppy pay-off renders a lot of the slow build-up somewhat pointless. By all means save the big spectacle for the final act, but if you're going to play the long game you need to make the wait worth it. Somewhat redemptively, we're along for the ride with a capable ensemble cast. When you've got a list of actors this impressive - Brolin! Watson! Hawkes! - you know at the very least they'll give their all even in the face of lacklustre material, and together they manage to convey the mixture of bravado and selflessness it requires to willingly take on a mountain that killed one in four professional climbers, even if some of their parts are really hypoxic. The one who gets the shortest shrift is Jake Gyllenhaal, who isn't in the film anywhere near as much as the marketing suggests. That false advertising in and of itself isn't the problem, neither really is the fact the film's underutilising a modern great. No, the problem comes from the fact that his character was in real life very important in transforming Everest from the reserve of top-tier climbers to a regular bucket list item; in sidelining him you sideline that entire contextual element, which the film to begin with seemed very interested in. That's pretty much the story of the film. It's not a bad movie and is quite enjoyable in spite of its faults; it's just rather a waste of serious potential. What could have been an intense look at the commercialisation of a deadly, inhuman location is instead a basic survival story whose biggest ambition is to pull on the heartstrings. Everest has high aims, but never really gets beyond the base camp. Anyone who's trekked in the Himalayas (guilty) will tell you that's no mean feat, but when you're aiming to summit it's not enough. Everest is in UK cinemas on 18th September and US cinemas on 25th September.
