Poor old Peak 15. It’s like a brilliant woman whom men see only for her perfect body. Into the Thin Air of Everest: Mountain of Dreams, Mountain of Doom portrays Everest as remarkable mostly because of its recreational opportunities, which afford humans infinite potential to chalk up “firsts”:
- First attempt
- First successful summit
- First via the south
- First by English [Chinese] [American] team
- First without oxygen
- First without porters
- First solo
- First American woman to summit without dying (surname: Allison!)
- First climb in the name of international peace…
It reminds me of those toys I used to see when M was little: Baby’s First Purse, Baby’s First Tackle Box, Baby’s First Golf Clubs, Baby’s First Laptop Computer Playset, Baby’s First Cell Phone, Baby’s First Baby…
So, back to the movie: the production style is offensive, produced in Fear Factor style with driven techno music and dizzying sequences of oddly angled images. The script bugged me, too: it kept referring to the mountain as though it’s a scheming enemy to be subdued: climbers attack it, assault it, conquer it.
On another level, though, the film is worthwhile. It’s the only one I’ve seen in which a present-day Sir Edmund Hillary appears, and there are interviews with a bunch of other climbers important in Everest’s mountaineering history. The ones active before the 70s are pretty cool people: true adventurers and athletes. But the newer crowd appears vacuous. Some are there as entrepreneurs, leading the inexperienced up the mountain for $60,000 a head. Others seem more dazzled by the fancy, high-tech climbing gear than by climbing.
Anyway, for the Fear Factor generation there’s footage of people with faces black with frostbite, and the last minutes of various people shortly before they toppled to their deaths, and some of the frozen corpses that speckle the mountainside. One in five people dies in trying to reach the summit.