Do all great stories deserve to be turned into movies? This is the question that Everest raises. The film, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, is based on the true story of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.
It has a terrific cast — Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Robin Wright, Sam Worthington – each playing an interesting character. The film, however, can’t decide if it wants to stay loyal to its ‘true story’ or play out like a typical disaster drama. In trying to do both, it loses focus.
Everest has many exciting ideas that the story could have been anchored on. It begins with a tense conversation between Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) and Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal), two experienced mountaineers. Scott believes that Rob has poached the journalist who was part of his team — one who had previously agreed to write about his business. Circumstances, however, force them to cooperate with each other. Just when we rub our palms in anticipation of the possible ego tussle, the focus shifts to Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), a mailman, who had previously come very close to scaling the mountain before failing. We empathise with him, but the narrative suddenly shifts to a 46-year-old Japanese woman, who has so far scaled six out of the world’s top seven summits, and wants to achieve her landmark by conquering Everest.
See the problem? The film fails to stick to one core idea around which drama and suspense could have been built; but the temptation is understandable, considering how, like in real life, almost all the character arcs are pregnant with drama. But the constant shift in focus makes it hard to identify with any one character.
Everest does gets a few things right though. It gives you an overview of what scaling the peak has come to mean today: It is no more about the human spirit to endure and conquer the great, punishing beast of a mountain. It is about businessmen offering an exotic tourist experience, with the help of localites (who are completely written out of the narrative). The film is happy to focus only on the travails of white Western mountaineers. The women, meanwhile, are relegated to crying on the phone to their loved ones, who get stranded without oxygen due to a blizzard.
In a conversation at the base camp, the mountaineers talk about their motivations to scale the peak. After some mumbling answers, Rob and others say, “Because it is there”. Should a movie be made on a true story simply because it is there to be made?
