{"id":659811,"date":"2026-10-28T18:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T18:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/659811\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T18:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T18:08:09","slug":"when-climbing-everest-stops-being-the-story-dying-for-it-takes-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/659811\/","title":{"rendered":"When climbing Everest stops being the story, dying for it takes over"},"content":{"rendered":"

The camera swoops over the side of the mountain, angled downward for vertiginous effect, and in the frame appear climbers in full gear, making their way up the snow-covered incline. It\u2019s an image begging for the big screen<\/a>, as big as possible. IMAX-sized. A cut to another angle, this time from a greater distance, looking up in awe at the majesty of the natural work. The peak of Everest fills the frame. It\u2019s stark, magnificent but imposing. The world\u2019s highest peak. No place on Earth is more literally insurmountable. No wonder so many want to surmount it.<\/p>\n

That might help explain how we\u2019ve ended up with two major films about climbing Everest arriving the same month. Tenzing, starring Genden Phuntsok and Tom Hiddleston, is a biopic<\/a> about the 1953 Everest expedition, the first to reach the peak. Arriving with perhaps even greater interest is a documentary, Everest: The Other Side, from Free Solo<\/a> directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. Both films are about fundamentally the same thing: What kind of person decides to scale the unscaleable, and why? They are psychological portraits, given an intense charge by the simple fact that mountain climbing is frequently deadly.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Peedom had the easier assignment directing Tenzing than her documentarian counterparts, though Peedom herself is a documentarian. Tenzing is her first narrative feature, and she brings with it the experience of years making documentaries, primarily about mountain climbing, including a few about Everest. That background is felt in the film, both in its awe for the mountain, as well as its photography. Shot by cinematographer Stefan Duscio (Upgrade<\/a>, The Wolf Man<\/a>), Tenzing\u2018s mountains are photographed with a documentary\u2019s immediacy. To accomplish the task, Peedom actually shot on real mountains, with portions of the movie filmed at the base of Everest, while other portions had the cast and crew literally scaling the peaks of New Zealand\u2019s Southern Alps. It looks real, and beautiful, and the effort of the production is evident on the faces of the actors and the vistas surrounding them. Added to that is the inspiring story of Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese-Indian Sherpa who grew up in the shadow of the Himalayan peak, dreaming from childhood about reaching the summit.<\/p>\n

If Tenzing is intent on awe and inspiration, Everest: The Other Side has more complex aims. Free Solo dealt with the almost incomprehensible psychology of a person whose greatest desire is to climb a cliff face without ropes, and what a romantic relationship with such a person looks like. Chin and Vasarhelyi\u2019s new film pushes things to an extreme, though that wasn\u2019t exactly the plan. Centered on climbers and romantic partners Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, the film is ostensibly about their plan to scale the rarely climbed and not tourist-infested North Face of the mountain, and become the first to ski back down. But what the film is really about is Nelson\u2019s death. In 2022, after the couple reached the peak of Manaslu in Nepal, Nelson got on her skis to make her way down the mountain, almost immediately causing a small avalanche that swept her away. The footage is in the film.<\/p>\n

Nelson\u2019s death immediately raises questions among everyone working on the project, including Morrison and the filmmakers, about whether it\u2019s sensible to continue. \u201cHow many people have eaten at our dinner table who\u2019ve died?\u201d Vasarhelyi asks Chin. At the time, the filmmakers were married. \u201cThat might take a while,\u201d he responds. When the numbers of dead are this high, it\u2019s easy to become inured and feel it\u2019s just part of the game. But it\u2019s not remotely a game, as Morrison\u2019s now-motherless stepchildren know all too well. How can any of this be justified? The project does move forward, though, with Chin himself stepping in to take Nelson\u2019s place on the Everest climbing team. There are more struggles and even accidents along the way, but the documentary\u2019s style implicitly assures us: There might have been one death, but Morrison will climb that mountain and ski down it in the end. There would be no film otherwise, at least not this film.<\/p>\n

Free Solo had similar built-in assurances, but the particular obsession on display in that film, the nature of its stunt, and the fact that there were no children back home to worry about made its examination of a single person\u2019s taste for the extreme a deliciously compelling piece of portraiture. It\u2019s clear in that film that Alex Honnold won\u2019t die, so it\u2019s all easy enough to stomach (though the incredible shots looking down the cliff face might not be). Everest: The Other Side offers no such distance from mortality, and its portraiture hardly makes up the difference. Rather than deal directly with a climber\u2019s compulsion to abandon or even hurt family\u2014we\u2019re talking about children\u2014Chin and Vasarhelyi take their cues from Morrison, whose self-justifications may or may not be understandable, but are never interrogated seriously.<\/p>\n

After Nelson\u2019s death, the documentary\u2019s story becomes one of regaining confidence and persevering through tragedy, including a late reveal that Morrison was previously married and lost his wife and two children in a plane crash. Its deployment is unseemly, a narrative strategy to paint Morrison in a more generous light than if the audience had been given the information at the outset. And while Chin becomes an active character in the film, Vasarhelyi retreats back, and their conversation about whether it\u2019s wise for him to do the climb is never really addressed again. It\u2019s an odd choice, and one likely to raise a few eyebrows when coupled with the fact that the pair divorced in 2025, the year that Morrison and Chin made their expedition. If a documentary is meant, in some senses, to be honest, like Free Solo felt, Everest: The Other Side is a letdown, its staggering images aside.<\/p>\n

Tenzing Norgay had kids, too. Yet Peedom\u2019s film about him doesn\u2019t come across as an exculpatory effort. Tenzing has history to contend with. Ask most people who the first to climb Everest was, and the name Edmund Hillary is likely the only one you\u2019ll hear. Tenzing is the corrective to that narrative. Hillary was the first to set foot on the peak, but he did so accompanied by Norgay, with whom he also formed a deep friendship. Luke Davies\u2019 script makes their friendship the film\u2019s beating heart. Disrespected and discriminated against by the various groups of Europeans attempting expeditions up the mountain, Norgay finds kinship in Hillary, a New Zealander who, despite his relatively immense privilege, is nonetheless also discriminated against by his British superiors. So much for keeping the \u201ccommon\u201d in \u201cCommonwealth.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the two discover in each other is a passion that\u2019s quite different from most of the mountaineers in their company. For the British, submitting Everest is a form of conquering, an expression of their imperial attitude toward claiming the world. Norgay and Hillary, both of whom grew up surrounded by mountains, feel a more spiritual urge. They know the mountain, but they want to know it. They want to commune with the world\u2019s natural wonder and feel a part of it. To reach the peak of Everest becomes a humbling experience, and the film\u2019s surprising power rests in that idea. Summiting Everest might be crazy, and it might come along with myriad ethical concerns, from personal safety to the imperial and industrial realities of mountain climbing, but it has meaning beyond individual narcissism. Being the first to reach the top of Everest may have been a victory for Britain, but the men who did it weren\u2019t British. In their way, they represented the world, and their success was a quite pure manifestation of the human desire to be at peace with nature.<\/p>\n

Tenzing does bog itself down in other ways. It pulls typical biopic moves, intercutting the story of the 1953 expedition with moments from Norgay\u2019s life, starting from childhood. The structural conceit is rote, sometimes to the point of eye-rolling, particularly near the end when flashbacks feel like interruptions. Still, there\u2019s a simple dad-movie pleasure in how everything unfolds, and when the film needs to be affecting, it gets there. That the film leaves certain ethical questions to the side is made up for by its attention to more systemic problems in the world of mountaineering, even 73 years ago, well before Everest would see nearly 1,000 people make the climb annually.<\/p>\n

Everest: The Other Side does itself no favors in this respect either. Surrounding Morrison\u2019s stunt is the fact that summiting Everest is no impressive feat anymore. Though people still regularly die on the mountain, the support systems on the Southwest face have allowed rivers of people to tour their way up the mountain, leaving behind untold debris, along with serious questions about the treatment of the local Sherpa and the general exploitation of people and our environment. None of this is addressed seriously in the documentary. It\u2019s all mere setup for why the North Face is the one to attempt, and even then Morrison needs to ski down it to make his expedition in any way special. Its meaning, despite the film\u2019s feints at universalism, come across as almost maniacally individualistic.<\/p>\n

Fascination with achieving the impossible is nothing new, and being the world\u2019s highest peak makes Everest a particularly compelling challenge and stories about it have a natural draw. Each in their way, these two films about the peak reflect that fascination right back to us, for good and ill. Everest: The Other Side, with its frequently jaw-dropping footage, presents a hyper-American story of Everest as a site for personal striving and achievement. It turns the mountain into just another thing for us to dominate and then feel good about having done so. Tenzing, for its part, may feel like a more standard affair, but offers a view of the mountain as something more collectively inspiring. The will to reach the top, despite all the complications inherent (and in some ways because of them), speaks to a spiritual oneness with our environment. We are a part of nature, and that demands humility from climbers and filmmakers alike\u2014especially at 29,000 feet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The camera swoops over the side of the mountain, angled downward for vertiginous effect, and in the frame…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-659811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}