{"id":923521,"date":"2026-10-10T22:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T22:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/923521\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T22:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T22:16:10","slug":"tenzing-review-a-remarkable-drama-puts-us-right-up-on-mount-everest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/923521\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Tenzing’ Review: A Remarkable Drama Puts Us Right Up on Mount Everest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe movies are having a mountain-climbing moment. More than a moment, really \u2014 it\u2019s been building since 2018, the year that saw the release of not one but two jaw-dropping, vertigo-inducing, heart-in-the-throat documentaries, \u201cFree Solo\u201d <\/a>and \u201cThe Dawn Wall,\u201d<\/a> that took you right up to the places that climbers crave and that most of us wouldn\u2019t dare to go near. But as these films demonstrate, we might well dream of it. The new mountaineering movies are delirious vicarious cinema, employing technological means and a filmmaking bravado that comes with them that would have been unimaginable three or four decades ago. Movies like \u201c14 Peaks\u201d and \u201cThe Alpinist\u201d \u2014 or \u201cSkywalkers: A Love Story,\u201d<\/a> the great documentary about rooftoppers \u2014 chart the impossible, and the very fact that the films exist can seem part of the impossible. That\u2019s an element of their scary exhilaration.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTenzing<\/a>\u201d fits into the genre, though in a far more traditional way. It\u2019s not a documentary. It\u2019s a drama, and a rather old-school one: the story of the first climb to reach the peak of Mount Everest, which happened in 1953. It\u2019s a tale of courage, ambition, arrogance, death, and triumph, and it\u2019s also a story of embattled national pride and ethnic identity. The team that scaled Everest in 1953 was led by the British, who were in the last throes of trying to stake out their empire. No one had ever made it to the top of Mount Everest (there had been eight previous attempts), and this team barely did either. The elements were too forbidding: the chasms and vertical rock faces, the wind and the storms, and the air \u2014 so thin it could kill you. The Brits were ready to conquer, but they couldn\u2019t have made the climb without their team of Sherpa, the Tibetan ethnic group native to the area, who had mountaineering in their blood. The Sherpa were officially the \u201cguides,\u201d but they knew what they were doing far more than the British did.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn that revolutionary trek, the first two people to reach the summit of Everest were Edmund Hillary, who was a New Zealander, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese-Indian Sherpa who\u2019d been dreaming of scaling Everest ever since he was a boy. These two were the Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of mountaineering. But for decades, because of his ethnicity, Tenzing\u2019s role in the mission was understated by history; he was treated as Hillary\u2019s noble assistant. \u201cTenzing\u201d celebrates his rightful place as a mountaineering visionary \u2014 and it does so by dramatizing this climb with a filmmaking rigor that\u2019s stately and inviting and, at moments, ominous and casually miraculous. (When a vast plain of snow suddenly collapses, you feel like a hole just opened up in the earth.) \u201cTenzing\u201d earns its inspirational fervor, but the reason it fits into the new wave of mountain-climbing movies is that the director, Jennifer Peedom, an Australian who\u2019s been making documentaries about mountain-climbing for 18 years, has staged it with a you-are-there authenticity that\u2019s breathtaking but never showy. She\u2019s a classicist; this is a movie that, in spirit, you could imagine John Huston or Howard Hawks having directed.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film opens with Tenzing as a boy, gawking at Mount Everest, which looms across the valley like Godzilla. It sits on the border of Nepal and China in the Himalayas, and Tenzing grows up in the shadow of its awe. He calls the mountain by its Tibetan name, Chomolungma, and early on has an encounter with the legendary British alpinist George Mallory (Johnny Flynn), who was part of the first three Everest expeditions in the 1920s. So from the start, the spirit of this endeavor will be global.<\/p>\n

\n\tPeedom isn\u2019t just a filmmaking wizard. She\u2019s a humanist who dramatizes the intricate politics of the 1953 Everest climb, which was led by John Hunt, a British colonel (played with stiff-upper-lip exuberance by Willem Dafoe) who believes that the entire mission should be run in a strict military manner. He\u2019s right in certain ways, but the trouble is that his outlook prioritizes hierarchy, which places the Sherpa at the bottom of the pecking order.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film flashes back, maybe a little too much, to key periods of Tenzing\u2019s life (his boyhood, his meeting of the woman he\u2019ll marry). But it\u2019s most interesting when he has to fight and cajole his way onto the expedition. Genden Phunstok, the Chinese actor of Tibetan descent who plays Tenzing, is disarmingly handsome, and in his quiet way he\u2019s a star. Dealing with the British, his Tenzing is scrupulous and honorable, but don\u2019t confuse that with subservience. He\u2019s got a will of iron, and a velvet wit, and something else the British don\u2019t have: a faith in the power of Everest that allows him to see the mountain as an ally rather than an adversary. He\u2019s not trying to conquer the mountain; he\u2019s trying to fuse with it. That gives him a whole different outlook as a climber.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the mission goes on, Tenzing forms a connection with Edmund Hillary, played with frosty empathetic reserve by Tom Hiddleston<\/a>. The two men have much in common; they are fearless but modest. \u201cTenzing\u201d captures the sometimes prickly camaraderie of the team members, a drama that feeds into the logistics of the climb, which the movie dramatizes with a stunning existential flair. You literally watch \u201cTenzing\u201d and think, \u201cHow on earth did they film this?\u201d It\u2019s the living definition of an adventure movie, but without adventure-movie corniness. The film never overhypes the danger or the dread, and it cuts no dramatic corners. It knows that the real story is gripping enough.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the men draw closer to the peak, the likelihood of reaching it actually grows more distant. The weather is too forbidding; the window of time gets smaller. Tenzing is promoted to being an official team member, and when he and Hillary are finally tapped as the two who will make the last leg of the trek, that\u2019s because it\u2019s now clear that they\u2019re the only two who can do it. Even then, their triumph is far from assured; the climb becomes more unreal in its harshness. The pull of \u201cTenzing\u201d is that we in the audience are there, right along with them, every snowy, icy, impossible step of the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The movies are having a mountain-climbing moment. More than a moment, really \u2014 it\u2019s been building since 2018,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":923522,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344,463814,156075],"class_list":["post-923521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-tenzing","tag-tom-hiddleston"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923521\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/923522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}