The Summit

High-altitude mountaineering fascinates many people, this reviewer included, for the extreme demands it places on sportsmen engaged on the sport. They go to places where helicopters don't go, where no human could live for extended periods of time. Different than other extreme nature sports like rafting, cross-country skiing or long-distance trekking, mountaineering provides the only way for people to reach places that are higher above the rest of the World.

In this context, I generally like documentaries and docudramas that focus on various aspects of the sport, its challenges and also its tragedies.

However, The Summit covers a nice story on a confusing and haphazard edition. It combines real-time footage of events, 'debriefing'-style post-fact interviews and dramatization of events are accounted by those that survived or witnessed them first-hand. All that material should yield a great final piece, but I'm left with the feeling of watching an unfinished job, or a piece that was somehow the result of compromises of an intractable committee with diverging opinions on how the documentary should look like.

The visuals are for the most part great, sometimes blurring the line between archival documentary footage and re-enactment.

But the movie itself is poorly structured.

For seemingly no reason at all it jumps back and forth in time, making one unsure exactly what happened when, and how much time has passed. I imagine a more linear approach would have been much more effective.

There was a bunch of climbers divided into three groups, but the movie doesn't do a very good job of introducing them, with a few exceptions, making them indistinguishable from one another. Consequently it's sometimes hard to understand who is where on the mountain and when, exacerbating the problems of the non-linear narrative.

It's a pity. This movie could've been great, especially with the documentary footage, but it's lacking in focus.

"He discovers things about his own body and mind that he had almost forgotten in the day-to-day, year-to-year routine of living." James Ramsey Ullman, High Conquest.

I don't know about you, but if I were approaching the "death zone" while mountain climbing, I'd turn back. However, you can bet the heroes of the documentary, The Summit, hiking the world's second biggest and most difficult mountain (it defeats 1 out of every 4 climbers), K2, had no such thoughts. The Summit won the Sundance World Cinema documentary award this year.

More interesting than the physical exploits is the rationale for doing such a dangerous sport in the first place. Yet, such psychoanalyzing is not a matter for The Summit, a thrilling doc long on the difficult climb and more difficult decisions while fates are decided in sometimes inscrutable and random ways. It's short on the motivation, which pretty much is accepted these days as, "because it's there."

Eleven climbers of 25 lost their lives that day in 2008 without an adequate explanation for any of the deaths. However this thesis is proved once more: Most lives in climbing are lost on the descent. The film has a fragmented, multiple-points-of-view (think of a climbing Rashomon) approach that cuts among the several players and history while featuring a couple of the more charismatic climbers, especially Ger McDonnell, whose death is the most difficult to understand even as he's touted for his alleged attempt to save 3 Korean climbers.

This discursive storytelling can be confusing while it saps the thrust of the inherently intriguing story. The many re-enactments drain the film of its immediate "what-the" doc impact. The film retains some of the awe we all feel when in the presence of such a manifestation of Nature's power:

"You do not laugh when you look at the mountains, or when you look at the sea." Lafcadio Hearn

From what I understood, this documentary set out to answer a difficult moral dilemma: should a climber endanger his own life in order to save others'? I think it did a beautiful job at giving a rather complete picture of people's different perspectives, attitudes, projected against the outcome. It is probably one of the best documentaries that I have seen, in the sense that it manages to capture the gist of this issue.

On a more personal note, I really liked the comment that the widow of one of the perished climbers makes towards the end of the movie. It raises an interesting question "of judgment" for the people that are outside the climbing world.

On August 2008, 11 mountain climbers die on top of the world second highest peak K2. This is a mix of interviews, documentary and recreations to tell the story of the eclectic mix of international teams of climbers. Also it has interviews with Walter Bonatti who is the youngest member of the '54 Italian expedition to summit K2 for the first time.

This is such a compelling true story. The climb and the descend is very tense. The only problem comes with a confused recounting of any controversy in the last 15 minutes. The ending is about a search for what happened to Ger McDonnell. It seems necessary to concentrate much more on him for the whole movie. Since they're doing recreations anyways, it's probably best to just do a narrative story with Ger as the protagonist.