Everest (2015)

if you're the kind of person who looks at the mountain of photographs buried to the waist in snow, fumbling with cords and Carabinas just a shift from certain death, and think "why bother?", then Everest probably not the movie for you.

This imposing real life thriller survival, about the catastrophic storm that claimed the lives of eight climbers and guides on the most powerful top of the world in 1996, has worked hard to make you feel like you're really there, scratching for safety, when disaster blowing in the wind.

But it is also because the film seems strangely little curious about what really pushes his characters to climb on top of the world, aching lungs and blackened toes, just to have a chance to be there, breathe thin air, and see the view of views.

Like the mountain itself, the history of Everest is presented as a brute fact uncircumnavigable. Many characters make their way up the rock, each with their own motivation and sketched lightly colored jacket. Like the old disaster movies, it is an ensemble film. The closest he has to a main character is Rob Hall (Jason Clarke), which the company Tour Adventure Consultants started running commercial shipments of the mountain in the early nineties.

At the moment the film begins, Everest is a serious tourist destination, and heavy foot traffic slows the rise and increased wear of the equipment. In a sequence early hair-raising, a ladder through a gorge shakes loose, leaving Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), a talkative Texan, hanging on for dear life.

The director, Baltasar Kormákur, depicts the scene with a drape, swirling camera and the use of 3D makes the yawn of the screen as an open pit mine: it reminds you of the seriousness of Alfonso Cuarón, but Curiously, it is one of only a handful of sequences in the film that could be described as a show.

Everest would have been a great film landscape - mountain appears alternately as a silty bottom of the ocean and the sulphurous crust of an alien planet - but Kormákur camera is frustrating reluctant to dwell on one view especially this one for long, preferring to hunker down with the cast as they inch up the rock. Maybe that's why Everest is not vital sense of you are there together by terror films such as Danny Boyle's 127 hours (which was co-written by one of the co-authors of Everest Simon Beaufoy): he never gives you quite a lively sense of where "there" is.

Instead, the main point of contact film with the audience is the eminently reasonable Rob - the script is at pains to point out, his work is not to take people to the mountain, it is to bring them to again - and Clarke did a fine job of making pragmatism and reliability compelling movie hero traits. (The braggart is best left to Jake Gyllenhaal, resplendent in beard and yak man bun, as rival tour operator Scott Fischer.)

The two Sherpas and female characters are visibly less rounded. Emily Watson puts in a profound change as a base camp hen mother, but as pregnant forward Rob back home in New Zealand, Keira Knightley devotes 95 percent of its whispering ash facedly screen time a cordless phone, and as a spouse also sidelined Brolin, Robin Wright hit almost complete 100.

Over the past decade, Kormákur moved successfully between small projects in his native Iceland and wider, Hollywood productions such as smuggling and 2 guns, and if you feel it is on the edge of a kind of breakthrough, Everest is not quite that.

"Because it's there" works as a philosophy of mountaineering - and it is mentioned several times in the film - but the film can not be content with that We have to be there too For all its grandeur frozen.. cold Everest never quite Screen jumping in your bones.