Everest is a movie about a mountain, a storm, and a dozen men who decide to keep climbing anyway. That sounds grim, and it is. But the 2015 film, directed by Baltasar Kormákur and starring Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Michael Kelly, Sam Worthington, and Keira Knightley, turns that grimness into something close to endurance theater. It is not a bad film. It is just a very grim one.
Trailer, via Working Title.
Climbing the First Hour
The film opens with a team of climbers assembling at Base Camp. They are led by Rob Hall (Clarke), a guide who has climbed Everest several times before. His client, Peter Harris (Brolin), is a wealthy businessman looking for a trophy. The rest of the group includes Beck Weathers (Hawkes), a doctor whose wife has begged him not to go, and Doug Hansen (John Gavin), a climber who has spent years training for this moment.
The film spends its first hour building tension through small moments. A radio call from base camp warns of approaching weather. A rope breaks. A climber falls. Each incident pushes the group closer to the summit, and closer to the wall of white that is coming down from the north.
The pacing is deliberate, almost too deliberate. Some viewers will find the slow burn rewarding. Others will find it tedious. The film trusts that the mountain itself is enough to hold attention, and for a while, that trust pays off.
The Wall Hits
Then the wall hits. The film shifts into a survival thriller, with the climbers trapped on the mountain as the wind picks up and visibility drops to zero. This is where the movie finds its footing. The handheld camera work, the freezing temperatures, the sense that the mountain has become an actual antagonist — these elements work together to create a tense, claustrophobic experience.
“The mountain doesn’t give a shit about you.”
That line, spoken by one of the characters, captures the film’s central thesis. The mountain is not a character in the traditional sense. It is a force of nature, indifferent to human ambition. The climbers must fight their way back down, and the film follows each of them individually as they make decisions that will either save their lives or cost them everything.
Thin Characters
The problem with Everest is that its characters are thin. Clarke is the best actor in the cast, and he brings a quiet intensity to Rob Hall. He plays the guide as a man who knows the mountain better than anyone else alive, but who also knows that knowledge is not enough. Brolin is adequate as Peter Harris, though the film gives him little to do beyond being rich and stubborn.
Worthington, playing a climber named Scott Fischer, is the most interesting of the supporting actors. His performance carries a sense of desperation that the script sometimes struggles to justify. Hawkes is fine as Beck Weathers, though the film’s treatment of his wife’s emotional journey feels rushed and underdeveloped.
Knightley appears briefly as a journalist, and her scenes add some levity to the proceedings. But the film’s focus is on the mountain, not on the people who climb it.
What Works and What Doesn’t
The film’s strengths are technical. The cinematography is excellent, capturing the scale of Everest without reducing it to spectacle. The sound design is effective, with the wind and the ice cracking adding to the sense of danger. The performances, especially Clarke’s, are solid.
Where the film falters is in its handling of the group dynamic. The climbers are a collection of individuals rather than a team, and the film rarely gives us a clear sense of who they are beyond their names and their roles. This is a problem because the film’s central conflict is a moral one: when the storm hits, who gets rescued and who does not. Without a strong sense of who these people are, that conflict loses its weight.
Final Word
Everest is a competently made disaster film, but it is a disaster film that lacks the emotional resonance of its predecessors. The film is at its best when it focuses on the physical struggle, and at its weakest when it tries to say something about the human condition.
Here is a rough ranking of the film’s elements:
- The mountain itself — the wind, the cold, the sheer height — is the film’s strongest asset.
- Clarke’s performance anchors the picture and gives it a center of gravity.
- The cinematography and sound design are technically proficient.
- The supporting cast delivers adequate performances, but none of them feel fully realized.
- The script’s handling of the group dynamics is the film’s weakest link.
The film’s final act, which follows the survivors as they descend and the bodies are recovered, feels rushed. The emotional payoff is there, but it is buried beneath the technical execution.
Everest is a grim film about a grim subject. It is not a failure, but it is not a triumph either. It is a solid, often tense, occasionally moving account of a disaster that changed mountaineering forever.
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