Everest
I could have subtitled this trilogy of reviews ‘Man vs Nature’ for each film shares that distinctive DNA of the pioneer and adventurer, of people who battle the elements to pursue a dream and inspire humankind.
We’ll start with ‘Everest’. I simply cannot fathom how people climb that mountain. I found just over an hour’s climb in Peru to be physically and emotionally exhausting and Wayna Picchu had steps! As the lead character explains, “Human beings simply aren’t built to function at the cruising altitude of a seven-forty-seven”. The lack of oxygen at altitude is tough enough but then to contend with some of the toughest climbing imaginable, where a foot wrong could lead to you plummeting to your death, well, you can’t fail to be impressed by such an endeavour. For now, this film is about the closest most of us will get to experiencing the terrifying beauty of Everest. It is certainly impressive in IMAX 3D and yet, for me, it never quite captured the awe of being on top of the world – I wanted more of what the characters could see around them, as opposed to being tightly focussed on the people themselves.
This tight focus is all the more irritating when the characters themselves are not very well drawn. We can’t even blame the fact that it’s based on real life because if you research Yasuko Namba, for example, you’ll find her described as not remotely being the archetypical Japanese woman, which is exactly how Naoko Mori plays her. Namba is quiet, avoiding eye contact, when it’s clear she was robust and far more interesting in real life. Equally, Josh Brolin’s Beck Weathers is little more than a brash American stereotype. Jason Clarke, so bland as the latest version of John Connor in the Terminator franchise, here does rather better as the intrepid expedition leader and John Hawkes arouses most of our emotional attachment with his kindly mail man, Doug Hansen, and yet we don’t care as much as I think we should about this team.
I’m not certain why this is but I wonder if we judge them too harshly because they chose to risk their lives, risking dislocation from their loved ones for the mere kudos of saying, “I climbed that”. I grant you that without a pioneering attitude, humankind would be lost and yet, in this film, I suggest that it sits uneasily with us. I am quite certain that the anxious wives depicted back home, waiting by the phone for news, would far rather have had their loved ones safely home, as opposed to the seemingly empty kudos of being able to say that their partner had climbed Everest.
The Martian
‘The Martian’ is happily breaking box office records and garnering top reviews for its portrayal of Matt Damon’s astronaut, abandoned and alone on Mars, but I’m afraid I’m going to buck the trend as it left me quite cold. The cinematography is incredible and you quickly forget that the production wasn’t actually filmed on the red planet but this isn’t enough to rescue it. Sadly, I think audiences have become jaded by such astonishing visual techniques – we’re no longer impressed by CGI or green screen advancements and they’re certainly not enough to carry a film.
The film, however, is certainly at its best on Mars. Damon is engaging in his portrayal of the ever-resourceful Watney, striving to beat the impossible odds to survive. There are some great comic moments and his refusal to give up is heartening but the film desperately falters whenever it returns to Earth. The machinations at NASA are frankly dull, with Sean Bean, in particular, looking bored throughout his unusual casting as flight director, perhaps casually dreaming of how much better ‘Sharpe’s Mars’ might have been. I am always going to measure science fiction against the extraordinary thrill ride that was ‘Gravity’ and, for me, this didn’t come close in its moments of drama to capturing the nail-biting, edge of the seat tension, which ‘Gravity’ achieved
The Walk
‘The Walk’, by contrast, took me by surprise. This film about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers had not been particularly well reviewed and was seen as redundant when explored so well in the documentary, ‘Man on Wire’, but I loved it. Perhaps the central problem is that Petit is not the most likeable of characters. Convinced of his destiny and his superiority as a performer, Petit bullies his team into achieving his grand design and rarely arouses our sympathy.
Yet Petit’s dream, the walk itself, is extraordinary. If I never felt quite on top of Everest, or with Damon on Mars, in the previous films, Zemeckis absolutely achieved the impossible feat of putting me out on a wire between two towers which no longer exist. Here, I felt the queasy tension with which ‘Gravity’ had overwhelmed me as I gripped my IMAX 3D armrest with white knuckles, looking down on New York. If cinema is to survive, it will be because of spectacles such as this, which the swankiest of home cinemas would struggle to re-create.
The film was also surprisingly moving. We were reminded that many New Yorkers had hated the towers, before Petit’s walk turned them into something magical. It is desperately sad that 9/11 transformed them into icons of terrorism but perhaps this film goes some way to reclaiming them.