The Summit

This is a story about tragedy caused by complete and utter confusion. From simple mistakes at the beginning of the attempt everything turned into chaos that cost many lives.

So, given that confusion in the subject matter, it would be difficult to remove confusion from the documentary. Sadly, the creators seem to have actually gone out of their way to introduce more confusion. Out of sequence histories, introducing another (related) story, and not attempting to tie everything together.

I'm glad that I watched this movie, I just would have liked it to be better put together.

I'd like to add to the chorus of voices complaining about The Summit, a collection of poignant interviews, skillfully staged re-creations of actual events, and documentary photographs and film footage, all jumbled together into an almost incomprehensible mess. It's not as if this documentary about the tragic events on K2 in the summer of 2008 is poorly edited, it's more like it wasn't edited at all. Imagine watching a story that has been chopped into pieces, thrown into a blender, and then reassembled by someone suffering from the same hypoxic delirium that contributed to the deaths of some of the climbers. One is left with the feeling of having watched an interesting and compelling story that should have been told in a far more concise and straightforward manner. Unfortunate, too, because it's a heck of a story.

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.

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.

Can somebody enlighten me about the directors ideas to cut the material as he did? 30 min in we are in newspaper clippings after the 'accident'/incident and feelings of friends of mountaineers. 5 min later we rewind to 3 months before.

the attempt to introduce the characters and tell the story seemed a bit too much of an endeavour.

i am really sad about this... very unsatisfying, this could have been a stellar piece of documentary.