Everest

This is an excellent movie. Good acting, great script and terrifying plot. Honestly, it is difficult for me to find any sympathy for any of the characters tho. At no stage does the movie give any appearance of professionalism or low risk. Anybody who ventures up on this crazed escapade does so with full knowledge that he or she is putting his own life and that of others at extreme risk. Zero sympathy when that eventuates. Choice! And ego!!

I am very surprised reading bad reviews about Everest. What did you expect it to be then? I sincerely did enjoy watching Everest. Also because it's based on a true story, what makes it even better to feel the despair they had at the end. It amazes me people would pay so much money to live an experience like that, where your life is at risk all the time. Okay it's a great achievement once you've done it, but I'd rather spend that money on a lazy sunny vacation trip. The fact is the top of the Everest is a graveyard with bodies of people that tried this expedition. The movie shows perfectly how hard it must be to climb the Everest. The lack of oxygen, the altitude, the sudden change of weather, it's all too much for a normal human body. The movie itself is beautifully shot, with good actors, a lot of tragedy. I didn't get bored for one second watching this movie. It keeps you on edge the whole time, because you can feel the courage and determination it takes to climb that mountain. Good movie if you ask me. Would watch it again in the future.

This is the true story of two different expeditions in 1996 who attempt to scale Everest but encounter massive storms on the descent down the mountain. Everest is a stunning looking film that you come away from , feeling totally exhausted. Because it is so realistic you do feel you are with the climbers at times. Sure , it's a stock disaster movie but because of the nature of the true story behind it , you feel more connected. The special affects are amazing and the performances from Jason Clarke and Keira Knightley are great too. I watched this in 3D but ended up taking the glasses off because it was so annoyingly dark so i recommend watching it in 2D instead. It's a staggering statistic that 1 in 4 people who attempt to get get to the summit of Everest , dies. Why do people do it? that question is asked in this film but apart from the stock answer of " Because it's there" it is never really answered . Perhaps there isn't one?

Having just this week returned from climbing all 19,341 feet of Kilimanjaro, I find myself intimately capable of reviewing "Everest", the new thriller from Icelandic director Baltamar Kormákur.

Based on a true story from 1996, Jason Clarke and Jake Gyllenhaal play Rob Hall and Scott Fischer respectively, rival organisers of commercial climbing ventures whose businesses involve training well-paying clients at Everest Base Camp and then taking them to the summit to experience the 'ultimate high'. When the climbing season of 1996 becomes hugely crowded, including a rather obnoxious team from South Africa, the two rivals decide it is in the interests of their clients to combine forces and attack the mountain together.

We are introduced to some of the clients including Texan Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), second-attempt postman Doug Hanson (John Hawkes) and Japanese mountaineer Yasuko Namba (Naoko Mori) chasing her seventh and final major mountain summit. Supporting the teams is hen-mother from base camp Helen Wilton (Emily Watson), medical helper Caroline Mackenzie (Elizabeth Debicki from "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.") and hard-man Anatoni Boukreev (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) who eschews the use of such luxuries as oxygen. To add dramatic tension to the situation, Rob Hall's wife (Keira Knightley) is heavily pregnant with their first daughter.

In an extremely hostile environment, as a storm passes through, the film neatly characterises how a single impetuous decision can have devastating consequences.

The action scenes in the film are well-executed with a number of vertiguous shots and heart-in-the-mouth moments, neatly escalated by Dario Marianelli's effective score. At its heart this is (without remembering the details of the original news story) a "will they, won't they" survival story of the ilk of "The Towering Inferno" and other classic disaster movies.

However, despite the long running-time and relatively leisurely built-up, I found there to be a curious lack of connection between the viewer and most of the key players. Perhaps this stems from the fact that you know they were all fully aware of the potential dangers? Or perhaps that the mountain seems a bigger character that any of the humans involved? Whatever the reason, it's only the future parental responsibilities of Hall that really resonate and make you root for him as opposed to any of the other characters.

Some of the hardest special effects to pull off are those that depict the natural world (as opposed to Krypton, Asgard etc), and in this regard the team led by Jonathan Bullock (from the Harry Potter series) does a great job. Whilst the "top of Everest" was in reality a set in the Pinewood 007 stage, you'll well believe a man can freeze there.

As such, this is a decent and entertaining telling of a true-life tragedy that will definitely work better on the big screen than the small.

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I think the main problem with this movie is a loose focus. It seems like they tried to make a disaster, drama and documentary stories at the same time but failed to develop any of that properly. But the good things first: stunning scenery, overall tension and a few really great scenes make this movie worth watching without a doubt. It is just somehow not working as a single piece. With a fast start you expect some eventful action to follow but there's nothing like that. The characters developing is limited to a couple of sentences excluding Rob Hall and Beck Weathers what makes others a little more than forgettable 'guys who die first'. For some reason, Scott Fisher, being a smart capable mountaineer is shown as a careless hippie-like person, Anatoli Boukreev as a cliché tough Russian playing garmon in a tent, Beck Weathers as a hardly-realistic guy from Texas. But it doesn't matter anyways as when the masks put on it's really hard to follow who is who and and their position on the mountain, especially on descending. The whole day of May 11 is clumsy and hardly could be learned from the movie, on the summit the story switches to Rob completely and gets distractingly touchy-feely then slowly turning into the aftermath. The drama feels a bit out of place when other participants dying with little or no attention. I was disappointed. The most vivid scene of the movie turned out to be shown in the trailer (crevasse ladder). Another Beck Weathers scene was really powerful too, but otherwise I didn't feel the pressure of surviving, the height itself (the stormy clouds could be seen from 2000 as well), an incredible effort to even try to step on that track.

Andre Bredenkamp writes about Everest climb: "You get completely disorientated. I had to keep reminding myself I was climbing a mountain. Every step of the way I had to try to motivate myself. At that altitude I took at least 10 to 15 breaths each time I moved one foot."

So if you really want to feel the height I would rather recommend to read the books about that night as this movie failed to show it properly.