Talkie Tuesday: Everest

"The last word always belongs to the Mountain."

Hello everyone!

Okay, so for this Tuesday, I decided to open up the flood gates. And I don't mean fictional ones, either. 

While I was at the seaside, just, you know, relaxing on my vacation and soaking up some much-needed vitamin D which has by now apparently evaporated between the wind we have here and the incoming rains, I also watched a bunch of movies that made me wish I could go back and maybe never make the decision to watch.

Not because they were so crappy.

But because they were so good, and unfortunately so realistic (as based off true stories will obviously go) that I bawled my eyes out like a huge, oversized baby.

It was not, in fact, a pretty sight.

The movie I'm talking about this time around is aptly titled with one word only, but it doesn't really need any more introduction than that: Everest.

So, first off: allow me to explain that I am not a mountaneer. I don't climb hills, much less do I aspire to crab-walk my way up a mountain (unless that one that's in our national flag and I think I will, someday, but a loooong time away). However, I have a huge amount of respect for people who do this. Some of my good friends climb, and my uncle could pretty much have been dropped off on a mountain as a baby and he would have happily bounced around there.

Which means this was a movie I went into with trepidation.

I knew there was going to be stuff in there I'd be mortally afraid of. I mean, come ON, they're climbing the world's tallest mountain! I can still vividly remember sitting in the cinema during 2012 when the ship's warning is going 'ALERT WE WILL HIT A HUGE OBSTACLE' and on of the actors asks 'What in the world can be over 29,000 feet tall?' 

Answer: Mount freaking Everest.

Now that that's been cleared up, let's cheerfully go into the movie!

It's a look back and adaptation on the infamous 1996 expedition to the top of Everest, led by Rob Hall. I say infamous because you'll get the reason for it really quickly.

Now, during this time, there was a huge influx of people who wanted to get up there and prove to everyone that they could, so what we see at the beginning of the movie is a combination of rules to respect when you're climbing (as in, if you start feeling weird, get off that blasted mountain ASAP), teaching the newbies how to adapt to bottles of oxygen (air up there is obviously not enough for breathing, thank you very much), and dealing ith traffic jams in the middle of icy crossings.

You read that one right.

With the sheer amount of people on the mountain, it's like an aiport, and Rob, as well as some others, realise they need to work together to create some sort of schedule to make things bearable.

This, of course, doesn't work out, so it's back to just going at it like scuttling mice. As a storm batters over Camp 4 (this would be base camp for making the summit), Rob and his team wait it out to try and see if the weather might clear enough to attempt the last lap.

It does, and off they go, under the watchful eyes of some other climbers facing the southern end of the same mountain, gazing upwards.

They do, in fact, reach the summit, but unfortunately they overstay their turning point, and horror of all horros there's another storm rolling right towards them.

I say that because, when you're 29,000 feet up, you can SEE the clouds rolling through the valleys below you and upwards, to come and swallow you and everyone that's around you without a lot of room to get back down to safety.

The storm hits, leaving Rob and the stragglers scattered and divided across the slopes of the mountain, with weather conditions impossible to beat and even the sherpas can't get to them. 

At this point, call it intuition, Rob's heavily pregnant wife wakes up back home, and calls camp to demand how come now one's told her yet that they've stepped off the mountain. Enter dramatic cue: Rob Hall is actually still ON the mountain, and they can't seem to reach him by radio.

In fact, Rob at this point is half-frozen, and with no one able to get to him it becomes clear at that point that he's probably lost (the irony being that if he had left behind the last of his stragglers, he probably would have made it ...).

They make a last ditch effort, getting his wife through on the line to see if she can talk him to sliding down lower where they could possibly get to him, because he's still far up in the nether hold of the storm, so to speak. He tries; he gives it a valiant, valiant effort. 

But in the end, the Mountain proves to be the stronger.

Out of the expedition, only those who were already lower in their descent survive, and one man, miraculously, who was exposed to the storm longer than should be medically possible for him to live, but he does.

Rob's wife gives birth to a baby girl a month later.

The bodies remain up on the Mountain to this day.

I seriously bawled my eyes out. That's not a movie I think I'll be rewatching any time soon. The people around me at the time when I watched this thought I'd lost my marbles; and I'll shamelessly admit that I thought it might turn into one of those American happy ever afters. When it didn't, it was even more devastating!

That being said, however, I think it's one of the more brilliant movies ever done, it shows what can happen when peope work together, if they overreach, and the consequences of being too arrogant in your own humanity. The actors delivered perfectly, and I think it was superb, if tear-worthy.

Lessons learned in this movie: never underestimate Mother Nature; never, EVER try to beat a bully that's the biggest thing on the planet in its own game; and absolutely never watch the movie Everest on a big screen, HD television.

I had nightmares about storms catching me up high for a week.

xx

*images and video not mine