Cerro Torre: A Snowball's Chance in Hell

While delivering everything you'd expect from a contemporary climbing movie - vivid first-person-pov, breathtaking vista, vertigo-inducing shots ... - this production delves deeper which makes for a better film. The difference came only with the problems the production ran into - while originally planned as a simple climbing flick, to be finished in a few weeks, in the end they had gone to Patagonia 3 times, had filmed 2 summit climbs and many more tries, had to weather a veritable shitstorm from large parts of the climbers community - and they used all this material to shed some light on the background, the philosophy, the frustrations of expedition climbing and so on. So this became a much richer and interesting project, even if the budget must have exploded. And to top that, they also put in a historical flashback, some interviews or contributions (Reinhold Messner and Jim Bridwell amongst others) and, last but not least, portraits of the camera team and their struggles to catch David Lama's final climb (which would be worth a documentation of its own).

Overall, recommended for everyone with even a slight interest in mountaineering or climbing, and much more interesting than a simple sports movie (as planned) would be.