A spectacular, heart-stopping adventure that has you catching your breath and gasping in shock. See it in IMAX 3D for an enrapturing you-are-there feeling.
This is the kind of movie movies were invented for: big, visceral, and intense, a heart-stopping adventure that has you catching your breath and gasping in shock as it takes you places most of us will never get to so as to engage in the sort of life-threatening thrills that, paradoxically, remind us that we are alive. That’s an argument that safety-minded homebodies like me scoff at when risk-takers make it, but Everest makes you understand it deep in your gut.
And this is true even though Everest is the story of what had been the deadliest climbing season on the mountain until the 2014 and 2015 avalanches. The events of 1996, which led to the deaths of eight people, are disputed in some of their details by survivors, yet generally well known to the public, thanks to adventure writer Jon Krakauer’s best-selling first-person account Into Thin Air — he was on Everest in ’96 on assignment for Outside magazine — as well as the 1997 American TV movie of the same name based on that book.
Plus there was also an IMAX team on that mountain that year, shooting what would become the 1998 IMAX documentary Everest, which is still the highest-grossing IMAX documentary ever.(Krakauer is a fairly major character in the ensemble here, played by House of Cards actor Michael Kelly. The IMAX team is mentioned but do not appear in any significant way.)