Jennifer Peedom's you-are-there drama reenacts the first ascent to the Everest peak, in 1953, with a classicism that's bold and inspiring. The movies are having a mountain-climbing moment. More than a moment, really — it’s been building since 2018, the year that saw the release of not one but two jaw-dropping, vertigo-inducing, heart-in-the-throat documentaries, “Free Solo” and “The Dawn Wall,” that took you right up to the places that climbers crave and that most of us wouldn’t dare to go near.
But as these films demonstrate, we might well dream of it. The new mountaineering movies are delirious vicarious cinema, employing technological means and a filmmaking bravado that comes with them that would have been unimaginable three or four decades ago. Movies like “14 Peaks” and “The Alpinist” — or “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” the great documentary about rooftoppers — chart the impossible, and the very fact that the films exist can seem part of the impossible.
That’s an element of their scary exhilaration. It’s a drama, and a rather old-school one: the story of the first climb to reach the peak of Mount Everest, which happened in 1953. It’s a tale of courage, ambition, arrogance, death, and triumph, and it’s also a story of embattled national pride and ethnic identity.
The team that scaled Everest in 1953 was led by the British, who were in the last throes of trying to stake out their empire. No one had ever made it to the top of Mount Everest (there had been eight previous attempts), and this team barely did either. The elements were too forbidding: the chasms and vertical rock faces, the wind and the storms, and the air — so thin it could kill you.
The Brits were ready to conquer, but they couldn’t have made the climb without their team of Sherpa, the Tibetan ethnic group native to the area, who had mountaineering in their blood. The Sherpa were officially the “guides,” but they knew what they were doing far more than the British did. On that revolutionary trek, the first two people to reach the summit of Everest were Edmund Hillary, who was a New Zealander, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese-Indian Sherpa who’d been dreaming of scaling Everest ever since he was a boy.
These two were the Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of mountaineering. But for decades, because of his ethnicity, Tenzing’s role in the mission was understated by history; he was treated as Hillary’s noble assistant. She’s a classicist; this is a movie that, in spirit, you could imagine John Huston or Howard Hawks having directed.
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