Everest: The Other Side review – couple’s climb on the mountain’s toughest face comes with tricky moral questions

Immersive portrait of mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson as they seek to become the first people to ski down Everest’s north face With some of its showings in the huge Imax format, this National Geographic-backed documentary feels like a callback to the early, glory day

Immersive portrait of mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson as they seek to become the first people to ski down Everest’s north face With some of its showings in the huge Imax format, this National Geographic-backed documentary feels like a callback to the early, glory days of large-format cinema when it was all about spectacle and scale, turning footage of natural-world wonders into an immersive experience. Those with a fear of heights or prone to vertigo may find this all a bit too immersive, in fact. That’s even more the case considering the point of the movie appears to be to provoke anxiety in the viewer for nearly the entire running time as we watch the subjects scale the steeper, far less travelled north face of Mount Everest and then, for reasons never quite adequately explained, ski back down it again.

Such was the mission of experienced mountaineer Jim Morrison , an amiable-seeming fellow who, like all of those who pursue extreme sports, seems to feel a compulsion to put himself in the kind of grave danger that, should things go wrong, would put other people in danger rescuing him. His partner Hilaree Nelson shares his passion, and the two of them set off to be the first people to ski down Everest’s north face, and the first third of the film tracks them as they plan and eventually do practice runs to achieve this goal. Neither seems able to adequately explain why they’ve chosen to take such a risk, although Nelson tries a bit to articulate her mountaineering life almost as if it’s a career choice that her two teenage sons should simply accept as her choice to make, and maybe even thank her for – even if that means that should she be injured or lost they and Morrison (who is not the boys’ biological father) would also have to deal with the aftermath.

Continue reading...