EVEREST
For starters, anyone who has never attended an IMAX screening has missed out on a new kind of amazing movie. With a screen five to eight stories high and some ninety feet wide, the panorama is magnificent. Add that IMAX films are photographed in 70 millimeter film so that unbelievably crisp, sharp focus prevails This huge encompassing brings you right into the picture as if you were there.
In this thrilling movie, a documentary of mountain climbers, both men and women, who want to conquer the very highest mountain peak on Earth located in China we are made to feel as if we know them; we understand to some degree their drive, their belief they can make it to the top despite many attempts by others having ended in the tragedy of frostbite and death because of the terrible windstorms and avalanches.
MacGillivray Freeman Films was fortunate enough to have two veterans of Mt. Everest leading the group, filmmaker David Brashears and Ed Viesturs, America's leading Himalayan mountaineer. Jamling Tenzing of Norway and Araceli Segarra, the latter wanting to be the first Spanish woman to reach the peak, were among those along with 8 other climbers, 50 porters and 100 yaks who were on this expedition. The cameras follow the intrepid adventurers ascent, the interim places where they stop to rest, the Sherpa villages, the base camps.
With oxygen content of the air becoming thinner and thinner with each new altitude, they are aware that the body must be allowed to accustom itself. To go straight up, even if one could, would mean death. These are some of the things the climbers have to keep in mind. Later, when they are near the top, the lack of oxygen combines with the utter weariness to cause them to lose their normal behavior and reasoning. Climbing is but one of the obstacles they have to face.
We are shown the gear used to climb, to span chasms, But the filming of the ascent required heroic work of getting cameras and film to the top where helicopters found it hard to go because there was not enough air to be gripped by the blades.
Breathtaking vistas, sweeping panoramas, fierce winds and snow storms are the norm in this magnificent film. For an adventure unlike most others, EVEREST cannot be beat.
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Copyright 1998 Ben Hoffman
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