Avis des critiques

Set in the closest place to the havens where it is still possible t ohave one's feet on the ground, naturally Everest is a grand spectacle, framing fragile human lives against the elevating scale of the Himalayan peaks.

Even more than the stunning natural vistas, it's this air of seriousness that dwarves the personalities onscreen... The script, by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, lets us know a little bit about each speaking character's past, yet no one narrative dominates. The movie represents an act of teamwork, much like the ascent itself.

[It's] handsome, not too cheesy, well-mounted – but doesn't really nail the emotional side, despite its efforts... Everest the film is Discovery Channel stuff, though fairly palatable; Everest the place is a whole other matter.

I've not read Krakauer's book, but perhaps I should. Coming out of this movie, the story remained upsettingly senseless to me, and an inapt one for a movie that. Despite its attempts at empathy, "Everest" often plays the cinematic thrill ride card.

Kormákur makes you feel the existential wonder, relentless risk, and spiritual exaltation of the climb. When one character gets a hand on the summit's peak, he doesn't want to leave. He's done something close to impossible, and achieving that might be better than living to tell people you did. But I left feeling a Werner Herzog kind of churlish. Failure always feels inexorable in this movie, and the mystical touches toward the end suggest that Kormákur doesn't disagree. Nature never loses.

Everest ultimately avoids passing any flat judgments, in part because it (perhaps smartly) doesn't opt to shade any of its real-life figures beyond musing "there but for the Grace of God went they." ... Everest is a tasteful, sweeping, carefully balanced reconciliation between the irrefutable authority of nature and mankind's innate need to circumvent it.

Everest's biggest flaw is that there are just too many characters. Whilst that might be true to life, in its filmic form it's the catalyst for a pretty serious lack of clear focus... It spreads itself too thin character-wise for the former and is too self-serious for the latter—leaving the final product something that's not particularly interesting or entertaining.

Kormákur shot in authentic locations, dragging his actors and crew to some of the most remote places on Earth. But he hasn't turned that search for authenticity into a fetish: The setting bears down on the performers and the characters, and when the director shows us a vast expanse, or a deadly cliff, or an eerily approaching storm, he always does it in context, making sure to keep the actors in the frame. In his hands, Everest becomes a film of intimate menace.

The adventure-turned-disaster script is as conventional as they come, while the spectacular Himalayan scenery and an effective use of 3D to convey vertigo (though not much else) make for a thrilling ride, especially in the nerve-wrackingly intense second half, which sees the mountaineers caught in a raging blizzard just after reaching the summit. Disappointing if not exactly surprising is the scant attention given to the weighty moral and philosophical questions raised by the fact-based story.

Everest is visually splendid, though it loses a few points for its murkiness in rendering its main characters as distinct individuals. But as a picture about tragedy, despair, and snow, it's pretty effective: The superb 3-D effects –including craggy vistas clad in frosty white icing, dangerously seductive in their beauty, and yawning cracks that seem to drop into oblivion – are likely to make you feel very small and insignificant in the context of nature and her merciless whimsy.

Baltasar Kormákur's true-life survival thriller doesn't match [Black Swan, Gravity or Birdman] in artistry or even raw spectacle, despite the innate visual grandeur of its setting and the gaunt drama of its story. But it has a brow-wrinkling, chin-down intensity of purpose – the same look that's often wrought across the faces of its cast as they plough on into the blizzard – and mostly succeeds on its own brawny, pulverising terms.

This is a movie not about a few human beings who tried to conquer a mountain, but rather a mountain that took no notice of the human beings in its midst. Kormakur doesn't make the mistake of exalting his subjects as extraordinary individuals, or suggesting that they were obeying some sort of noble higher calling. "Everest" is blunt, businesslike and — as it begins its long march through the death zone — something of an achievement.