Into Thin Air: EVEREST

It’d be easy to call Everest a man versus nature story, but that’s downplaying the extent to which nature dominates. It’s never a fair fight. Telling the true story of a 1996 storm that left a group of mountain climbers stranded at the world’s tallest peak, making the return climb treacherous and nearly impossible, the film creates an enveloping sense of natural danger. When the winds kick up and gusts of snow pummel the characters as they stumble along narrow paths, clinging to guide ropes near cavernous drops, there’s a convincing sense of disorientation and danger. One wrong step, one wrong decision, and it could mean certain death. In the film’s most haunting image, a struggling member of the group steps wrong, wobbles, and simply disappears, falling off the edge of the frame while a man in the foreground holds on for dear life. He glances back, notices with horror the empty hooks swinging in the storm, and then continues trudging foreword towards his ultimate fate. As one character ominously warns early on, “the mountain always has the last word.”

Shot with solid meat-and-potatoes sturdiness and completely convincing effects and stunts, director Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband) indulges in a few sweeping spectacular vistas, but otherwise keeps the epic backdrop in the background. He chooses instead to focus on the people making their way through the landscape, as they joke, bond, argue, succeed, struggle, and die. William Nicholson (Unbroken) and Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours), no strangers to stories of remarkable survival, have written a screenplay interested in process and procedure, spending a great deal of time assembling the team and taking them through the steps of an ordinary climb up Everest, a fraught and fascinating prospect in and of itself. It’s clear how slow, difficult, and challenging it is to climb any mountain, let alone Everest. There are medical concerns, perilous heights, unexpected delays, deadly cold, and dwindling oxygen. And that’s before the storm even starts.

The main characters are a crew from New Zealand running an expedition up the mountain, a guide (Jason Clarke), a base camp supervisor (Emily Watson), and a doctor (Elizabeth Debicki). Their clients include a mailman (John Hawkes), a wealthy Texan (Josh Brolin), a journalist (Michael Kelly), and an experienced climber (Naoko Mori). Also on the mountain are rival groups, including one led by a brash American (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to reach the summit, and one (led by Sam Worthington) going up the shorter mountain next to it and can only watch in horror as the storm clouds roll in over their colleagues. It’s not always easy to tell all these people apart, especially once they have oxygen masks over their faces and ice-covered hoods pulled low over their goggles. We see only figures struggling up the mountain, and then feeling the panic kick in once they desperately need to get back down.

When a mask is pulled off, revealing the character actor beneath, it’s easier to tell who is where. But maybe the point is to mimic some of the disorientation of thin air and exhausted lungs. The performances are solid physical presences, filling their corners of the frame with a sturdiness and confidence that’s all the more difficult to see fade away. Some are unpersuasively overconfident. Others are understandably worried. There are token characterizations to flesh out the ensemble. We hear reasons for the trip – to be brave, to be accomplished, to be awed – and overhear sentimental calls back home to nervous wives (Keira Knightley cuddling a fake pregnant belly, Robin Wright corralling teens). But these biographical details are sparse, adding only reliable extra gloom as the camera contemplates the thunderous darkness encroaching.

Kormákur shoots the proceedings with a relatively restrained eye. He doesn’t amp up the action, provide CGI dazzle, or find room for unrealistic cinematic heroics. As small mistakes and nature’s fury combine, death comes quickly for some, slowly for others, and narrowly misses still more. Cinematographer Salvatore Totino’s wide lenses capture an immense sense of beauty and danger, while the sound effects crunch and howl. It never comes to life as a personal journey, the characters remaining too vague to really develop, but as a view of process – of a feat of mountaineering giving way to a struggle to make it back alive – it’s gripping. As it narrows to consider the tiny interpersonal moments that seal each one’s fate, there are moving moments of triumph and pain, flashes in a storm that wipes away all certainty. It’s a big Hollywood epic with a small eye, with stories of survival not through any grand action, but through endurance and chance. It has the trappings of a disaster movie, but none of the thrill. It starts with cautious excitement, turns scary, then left me feeling only sad.

Great Powers, No Responsibility: CHRONICLE

Josh Trank’s debut feature Chronicle is a nice spin on the typical superhero origin story. It’s such a nice spin that, until late in the film when it makes blatant nods towards that direction, it could be any old found-footage horror movie with vaguely supernatural things happening to a small cast of teens. It starts with Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a loner high-school senior, getting his hands on a video camera with which to document his life, which is certainly not going well. His father (Michael Kelly) is a drunk, abusive man. His mother (Bo Peterson) is dying. When he goes to school, things aren’t much better. He’s ignored, or worse, bullied. When his popular, extroverted cousin (Alex Russell) invites him to a cool party, he reluctantly takes the chance to get out of the house.

At the party, he, his cousin, and another popular senior (Michael B. Jordan) head out into the woods to explore a mysterious hole in the ground. We follow the shakily filmed teens down into the hole where they find a massive glowing blue crystalline wall (government secret? alien artifact?) that makes their noses bleed and the camera go all screwy. The screen goes black. When it comes back to life, Andrew has a new camera. We see the three guys playing catch. But it’s not quite that simple. Soon it’s apparent that the ball they’re throwing is veering off at weird angles or even stopping mid-flight, hovering in the air. They’re controlling the ball with their minds. Then one of them notices a small trickle of blood leaking out one nostril.

The teens explore their newfound telekinetic powers in a casual, goofy way that feels more or less the way actual teenage guys would handle the situation. Do you really think they’d head right out to fight crime? That’s a superhero trope that’s nicely cast aside here as they wander around town playing pranks, roughhousing, taunting bullies and trying to get girls. It’s all so simple, but the found-footage style (albeit deployed in a way that grows increasingly strained) gives a shaky verisimilitude to the kinds of powers we’ve seen many times before. When one of the guys discovers that they can levitate themselves – flying, actually – the way they try it out made me actually concerned they’d fall. When was the last time I was afraid some superpowered character would drop out of the sky? Maybe never.

There’s a winning lack of confidence to these characters, a halting sense of bewildered and astonished improvisation with their new abilities. Especially with Andrew, a sullen kid who gets powers and a new group of friends in the very same instant, the film gets good use out of its central metaphor of superpowers being an unstable aspect of adolescent id within an overwhelming sense of change. The screenplay by Max Landis (son of John) can be (but isn’t always) especially acute in the way it deals with the shifting emotions of its three leads.

Where the film starts to fall apart, when the small sense of disappointment sets in, is when it becomes just another superhero movie. It’s still found footage, but the commitment to believable shots (such a crucial, enjoyable aspect in Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity movies) starts to slip away. And, though the characters are still just regular teens with special abilities and nary a mask, cape, or latex suit in sight, the climax of the story hinges on yet another sequence in which guys beat up on each other with their superpowers. I was engaged and intrigued by the film for so long, enjoying ways that it tweaked teen movie moments like a party or a school talent show with an injection of supernatural powers, that when it sinks into cliché it’s all the more frustrating. That said, the climactic battle plays out with more weight and impact than you usually find. The stakes feel real and though the blows between the combatants feel CGI weightless, the collateral damage has a believable immediacy to it. But I couldn’t help but wonder who could have possibly found all of this footage (expanding from the simple camera to a host of amateur photographers, security cameras and police car dashboards) and then edited it together. It’s not exactly motivated.

But those questions barely bothered me in the moment. The film’s a skillful slide from a genre goof into truly dark territory as Trank’s direction of Landis’s script makes genuine emotional and metaphorical sense out of powers that could otherwise have been glossy B-movie accoutrements. It resists coping out of its genre tweaking by going all the way with suits, superhero names, and catch phrases. It stays likably grounded. Although I had the sense that in the near future, just past the end credits, one of these characters is going to be donning a superheroic persona, it doesn’t feel like just another would-be franchise starter. The actions the young guys take feel convincing and the outcome is always a little in doubt. In the end it’s surprisingly unsurprising, but it’s nicely done in a way that feels new and exciting even when it's not.