Hundreds of controversies have poured down on Jon Krakauer's book, and the events of the tragic 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest will certainly never stop being covered by rivers of words.
We wanted to see this film knowing full well that we would never get to the bottom of the facts, and certainly that we would not be watching a particularly fine piece of cinema. And so it was.
The film Into Thin Air turned out to be what it is: a comical reconstruction entirely centred on the character of Jon Krakauer. A watered-down tragedy, with the moral artfully recited by the Krakauer character to commemorate the companions lost on the mountain.
The acting too is, in the opinion of the critics and in mine as well, decidedly mediocre. Of them all only two actors stand out: Nat Parker as Rob Hall and Peter Horton as Scott Fischer.
A film like Into Thin Air does not shed light on the facts, we have said so; we go and see it because we hope to savour the pathos, the sense of tragedy, and on this score Robert Markowitz has certainly not been a master. The set technique is slapdash, the shots almost all at human height. There is no exaltation of perspective, of the extraordinary dimensions of the mountain (after all, we are talking about Everest. It makes no use of slow motion, there are no interesting point-of-view shots. But the most disconcerting lack of skill is the photography. For anyone who knows about photography, mountains leave little room for error; any director rightly assisted by a good photographer would have been able to shoot breathtaking panoramic footage, which instead is completely missing from the film.
Clearly the landscape is obviously not Himalayan, any viewer can tell; the film was shot on location in the Pitztal in the Austrian Tyrol. This creates a strong false note throughout the whole film. It looks like the Sunday home movie shot by a
group of climbing friends. The film Into Thin Air manages to be neither a tragic film nor a mountaineering documentary.
Those who have seen the documentary film by David Breashears, shot for IMAX at the very time of the tragic events, know the difference between a good film and a picture improvised in less than a year of work.
Additional information:
Original title: Into Thin Air
Directed by: Robert Markowitz
Written by: Robert J. Avrech
Release date (USA): 9 November 1997
Genre: Adventure and Biography
Running time: 90 min
Bernard Sofronski Productions.
Cast:
Peter Horton ... Scott Fischer
Christopher McDonald ... Jon Krakauer
Nathaniel Parker ... Rob Hall (as Nat Parker)
Richard Jenkins ... Beck Weathers
Tim Dutton ... Andy Harris
Akemi Otani ... Yasuko Namba
Peter J. Lucas ... Anatoli Boukreev
Long Nguyen ... Ang Dorje
Jeff Perry ... Doug Hansen
Ned Vaughn ... Neal Beidelman
Richard Rees ... Lopsang Jangbu Sherpa
Stuart Milligan ... Dale Kruse
Nicholas Hewetson ... Tim Madsen
Luke Garrett ... Mike Groom
Romilly Weeks ... Charlotte Fox
Among mountain films we have also reviewed Nanga Parbat by Joseph Vilsmaier.