It's 1994 (even before the great Into Thin Air tragedy): New Zealand guide Mark Whetu and his client Mike Rheinberger push on to the summit of Mount Everest, but realise too late that it has got too late. Mike Rheinberger, after six attempts to reach the summit, obsessed with his conquest, decides to carry on.
In short, this is for now one of the hardest and most difficult documentaries to watch: it is the encounter with death. It is raw, painful content that carries with it the most debated subject in the world of extreme mountaineering.
You understand from the start how the story will end, and yet you have time to get to know the protagonists. You know from the start that there is no escaping the twists of fate. Mike Rheinberger goes to meet his destiny with no chance of escape.
Through a series of coincidences and fatalities Mark Whetu finds himself forced to abandon his client. He manages to get down but, because of frostbite, loses the toes of both feet.
What is astonishing about this video is how (in Mark Whetu's conscience) it was possible to make a reconstruction for this documentary. He himself says he was haunted by remorse, and yet in the final scenes there are some disturbing shots. Someone films him lying in the sun waiting for his feet to heal. He drinks, pensive, with the air of a suffering warrior.
What is astonishing is that all this was "exploited" to tell the story of a foretold failure as though it were instead the heroic epic of a fighter.
It is probably true that it was nobody's fault (debatable), but it is just as true that making a documentary in which you see a man who is going to meet his death fall to his knees (I personally, and I say I personally) find truly amoral. Yes! Really! because Mark Whetu will probably have some juicy royalties coming his way...
For Mike Rheinberger it was probably a game... but for Mark Whetu it was certainly a job, and that job was not done properly.
That life then goes on, as the author of this controversial film wants to emphasise, seems so obvious and taken for granted that it slips clearly into the background. And yet perhaps it was precisely this second and more important theme that should have been brought out.