‘Everest’ tells a true story of mountain-climbing disaster

While some may not enjoy watching how people lost their lives in such brutal circumstances, the way director Baltasar Kormákur has executed the true tale is visually stunning and respectful. The cast consists of a number of well-known actors willing to fearless the elements to make an authentic film. If ever you wanted to know just how small and insignificant we are when facing the full force of the natural world (a course in humility we probably all could use from time to time), this is your film. Interest in climbing Everest has reached such a frenzy that company’s have started offering organized climbs for those willing to pay the $65,000 fee. The three manage a delicate balance between peril on the slopes and an emotional connection with the characters, notably expedition leader Rob Hall (Jason Clarke). These wildly contrasting conditions can succeed each with shocking speed, as the climbers discover when their tantalising window of mild weather is suddenly slammed shut by storms and blizzards.

Who: With Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Jake Gyllenhaal. Some don’t win that fight.

The Oscar-nominee showed his personal and insightful side during interviews promoting his new drama-thriller film. But if this presentation is anywhere near to the actual experience, then climbing Everest is both the most visually exhilarating and personally unjustifiable adventure mankind can face.

On that fateful May day on the mountain, some problems, like a awful storm, are acts of God, but others are the product of human error and personality. They are assigned the wife archetype, waiting by the phone to get word on their husband’s fate.

Clarke’s performance is one of cool control and resolve. She’s Beck’s wife back home in Dallas. Jake Gyllenhaal portrays another guide with whom Rob has a friendly rivalry, exhibiting a more carefree and somewhat hazardous attitude. (It was also filmed in the Italian Alps and, though you’d never notice, on stages at England’s Pinewood Studios.) And what a cast – particularly Hawkes as the underdog Hansen and Brolin as Weathers, whose big-money swagger hides a hole in his soul. There are moments throughout the film where we’re meant to connect with these “ordinary” people – one of them is a mailman, for goodness sake – but you can never gather enough energy to root for these insane people that are willing to risk life and limb to climb a damn mountain. It’s a film with heaps of ice, snow, facial hair, mountains, whiskers and men yelling frantic directions at one another through their cold whiskers.

He combines those types in “Everest”, a frighteningly good picture about an ill-fated assault upon the world’s highest mountain in 1996. Yes, Krakauer is a character in the movie, played by House of Cards actor Michael Kelly, but the film, which was adapted by William Nicholson (Les Miserables) and Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), does not stem from his memoir.

Such death-defying stunts and shots have usually been the stuff of fiction in overdone mountain-climbing thrillers such as 1993’s “Cliffhanger” and 2000’s “Vertical Limit”. In turn, the mountain nearly becomes a character itself.

Early in “Everest”, a group of seasoned mountaineers sit around trying to find an answer to the question that haunts their passion: Why?