Everest is not a bad movie, but it isn't a pretty one either, it's pretty bad! especially for anyone who has viewed mountaineering and/or survival themed movies before.
Cinematography: The cinematography is certainly good. Some panoramic scenes are breathtaking and successfully convey the awesomeness of the task that is scaling the Everest.
Music score: I can't recall now if the movie even has an original music score or any music at all. A rather odd exception for a movie that is bound to have elements of suspense and intense human drama.
Casting: There are some big names in the cast, who have been assigned small parts and the lead roles given to relative and complete unknowns. The audience has an obvious expectation of the significance of a character based on the reputation of the actor playing that part. Now, big names are sometimes used to play characters that die early and unexpectedly to put the reassured audience in a state of shock and real sense of danger about the remaining characters. However, Everest employs no such ploy. The casting is just plain nonsensical.
Character development: Rarely have I seen a movie that does a worse job of character development than Everest. There is a lot of time spent on absolutely irrelevant small-talk, boring background description, prosaic emotional dialogues and for so many characters. At the end of this we are left with one dimensional characters. There isn't a single character, including the protagonist (whoever that is?) that is even two dimensional. It is difficult to impossible to relate or care about any of the characters. One could not care less if a character went up the mountain, or down, or just round and round. It felt weird to be so enormously apathetic about any character falling in or out of peril on the slopes.
Acting: I suppose some of the bigger actors tried to do the best they could with the small parts and insipid dialogues, but the actors in the leading parts failed to deliver. The portrayal was dead-pan throughout.
Direction, Script-writer: The only thing that could compare to the everest in this movie is the colossal failure of the director and the script-writer. A mediocre school-boy writing and presenting his first essay ever in school would do about the same as these two. A directionless rambling of random excerpts from a book about the story. When you watch how some directors and script-writers can get a character under your skin in a few minutes you realize just how bad a job was done in this movie.
Movie is art ... not a tax-return form: One can understand that the director wanted to be true to the actual story to the letter, with no dramatization, with an assumption that the grandiose setting, that is the Everest, would naturally and automatically impress itself upon the mind of the audience. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the audience cannot implicitly feel the bone chilling winds, or the asphyxiating low oxygen air, or acrophobia, or fatigue sitting in their cushioned seats. They need to be shown these things visually, or through the condition of characters they have been made to care about conveyed through dialog or action. However, Everest director seems to forget these very fundamentals of movie making.
Conclusion: Go see 'Touching the void' instead of this movie and if you have already seen 'Touching the void', then go see it again and it will surely be more suspenseful, entertaining, and rewarding than watching Everest.
