The Summit

The story and the history is very interesting. The plot is chaotic. The interviews are random and there is no real reconstruction at the end. I made a better movie when I was 16 years old. Wasted potential.

High-altitude mountaineering fascinates many people, this reviewer included, for the extreme demands it places on sportsmen engaged on the sport. They go to places where helicopters don't go, where no human could live for extended periods of time. Different than other extreme nature sports like rafting, cross-country skiing or long-distance trekking, mountaineering provides the only way for people to reach places that are higher above the rest of the World.

In this context, I generally like documentaries and docudramas that focus on various aspects of the sport, its challenges and also its tragedies.

However, The Summit covers a nice story on a confusing and haphazard edition. It combines real-time footage of events, 'debriefing'-style post-fact interviews and dramatization of events are accounted by those that survived or witnessed them first-hand. All that material should yield a great final piece, but I'm left with the feeling of watching an unfinished job, or a piece that was somehow the result of compromises of an intractable committee with diverging opinions on how the documentary should look like.

From what I understood, this documentary set out to answer a difficult moral dilemma: should a climber endanger his own life in order to save others'? I think it did a beautiful job at giving a rather complete picture of people's different perspectives, attitudes, projected against the outcome. It is probably one of the best documentaries that I have seen, in the sense that it manages to capture the gist of this issue.

On a more personal note, I really liked the comment that the widow of one of the perished climbers makes towards the end of the movie. It raises an interesting question "of judgment" for the people that are outside the climbing world.

Confusing and untrue at times. I had to read about what actually happened to find out the facts after 2 hours of poorly put together interviews. Also the Serbian climber was quite selfless and died because he unclipped to let other people pass him, not to pass Skog. I don't know why they would make such a strange mistake on this detail, but it's either deliberate lying to make the story better or poor research.

At 8 a.m. climbers were finally advancing through the Bottleneck. Dren Mandić, from the Serbian team, decided to attend to his oxygen system and so unclipped from the rope to let other climbers pass. Mandić lost his balance and fell, bumping into Cecilie Skog of the Norwegian team. She was still clipped to the rope and was only knocked over. Mandić fell over 100 m down the bottleneck.

Can somebody enlighten me about the directors ideas to cut the material as he did? 30 min in we are in newspaper clippings after the 'accident'/incident and feelings of friends of mountaineers. 5 min later we rewind to 3 months before.

the attempt to introduce the characters and tell the story seemed a bit too much of an endeavour.

i am really sad about this... very unsatisfying, this could have been a stellar piece of documentary.