This is the true story of two different expeditions in 1996 who attempt to scale Everest but encounter massive storms on the descent down the mountain. Everest is a stunning looking film that you come away from , feeling totally exhausted. Because it is so realistic you do feel you are with the climbers at times. Sure , it's a stock disaster movie but because of the nature of the true story behind it , you feel more connected. The special affects are amazing and the performances from Jason Clarke and Keira Knightley are great too. I watched this in 3D but ended up taking the glasses off because it was so annoyingly dark so i recommend watching it in 2D instead. It's a staggering statistic that 1 in 4 people who attempt to get get to the summit of Everest , dies. Why do people do it? that question is asked in this film but apart from the stock answer of " Because it's there" it is never really answered . Perhaps there isn't one?

Having just this week returned from climbing all 19,341 feet of Kilimanjaro, I find myself intimately capable of reviewing "Everest", the new thriller from Icelandic director Baltamar Kormákur.

Based on a true story from 1996, Jason Clarke and Jake Gyllenhaal play Rob Hall and Scott Fischer respectively, rival organisers of commercial climbing ventures whose businesses involve training well-paying clients at Everest Base Camp and then taking them to the summit to experience the 'ultimate high'. When the climbing season of 1996 becomes hugely crowded, including a rather obnoxious team from South Africa, the two rivals decide it is in the interests of their clients to combine forces and attack the mountain together.

We are introduced to some of the clients including Texan Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin),second-attempt postman Doug Hanson (John Hawkes) and Japanese mountaineer Yasuko Namba (Naoko Mori) chasing her seventh and final major mountain summit. Supporting the teams is hen-mother from base camp Helen Wilton (Emily Watson),medical helper Caroline Mackenzie (Elizabeth Debicki from "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.") and hard-man Anatoni Boukreev (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) who eschews the use of such luxuries as oxygen. To add dramatic tension to the situation, Rob Hall's wife (Keira Knightley) is heavily pregnant with their first daughter.

In an extremely hostile environment, as a storm passes through, the film neatly characterises how a single impetuous decision can have devastating consequences.

The action scenes in the film are well-executed with a number of vertiguous shots and heart-in-the-mouth moments, neatly escalated by Dario Marianelli's effective score. At its heart this is (without remembering the details of the original news story) a "will they, won't they" survival story of the ilk of "The Towering Inferno" and other classic disaster movies.

However, despite the long running-time and relatively leisurely built-up, I found there to be a curious lack of connection between the viewer and most of the key players. Perhaps this stems from the fact that you know they were all fully aware of the potential dangers? Or perhaps that the mountain seems a bigger character that any of the humans involved? Whatever the reason, it's only the future parental responsibilities of Hall that really resonate and make you root for him as opposed to any of the other characters.

Some of the hardest special effects to pull off are those that depict the natural world (as opposed to Krypton, Asgard etc),and in this regard the team led by Jonathan Bullock (from the Harry Potter series) does a great job. Whilst the "top of Everest" was in reality a set in the Pinewood 007 stage, you'll well believe a man can freeze there.

As such, this is a decent and entertaining telling of a true-life tragedy that will definitely work better on the big screen than the small.

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Certainly stunning to look at, this film about a 1996 trek to the top of Mount Everest really shows the narcissism involved in most of the participants, risking their lives simply just to get their name onto the list of survivors or on the list of the hundreds being mourned. If anything, this film is a deterrent from making the journey and the risk, especially when the group passes by a few corpses that did not make it an obvious slid down only to die of their wounds or other unnatural causes.

An all-star cast (Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Robin Wright, Kiera Knightley among them) play the participants in this journey or their family members, worried about them from afar. You can see the motivations for pretty much all of the characters, some honorable and brave but others rather cocky and egotistical. Every time a potential disaster hits, I would say to myself, "If that was me, I would die", and fortunately, these incidents for the most part seem to be presented realistically and when a tragedy does happen, it is shocking and vicious as nature can be sometimes.

You get to see a little bit of the Indian culture as the group travels to the slopes far out of the city, and even from a distance, the range looks seriously dangerous. Nature is unpredictable, and when wind storms and avalanches and other natural events take place, there's no escaping it. I was feeling queasy just watching the people cross over the very high up pedestrian bridge above a gorge, and having done some hiking on much smaller mountain ranges, my fear was real knowing how I panicked even trying to get across a gorge in the Hollywood Hills at Runyeon Canyon let alone a bunch of miles above sea level.

Fortunately so, the film does not go to deep into the personal lives of these characters because that would be distracting and take away from the real issues they face. There's no sentimentality here at all and that is a very good thing. It is that directness within the script that eventually has everybody working together to make sure as many people as possible is able to get down and back home. So I can say while I did not like all of the characters, eventually I did begin to root for them even though my initial Impressions were not so great.

The photography is stunning, and the action during the storm sequences is nail biting. Discussions of how the brain adapts unsuccessfully to the change in oxygen level does bring on some shocking sequences including someone coughing up blood. This is a type of film where the Jew or is content either sitting in a comfortable seat in the movie theater or on their own couch, and anybody who has the inclination to want to try this may be easily convinced otherwise after seeing it.