Don’t kid yourself — Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin‘s Everest:The Other Side is perhaps (and I take no comfort in reporting this) the most appalling, deeply repulsive, crazy-town mountain-climbing doc ever made.
It’s about the perils and pitfalls of being a do-or-die Mount Everest risk junkie, and about a blissfully lunatic rationale that seeks to enoble reckless mountain-climbing behavior of the most irrational kind.
The invisible subtitle of Everest: The Other Side is “we have a rendezvous with death, and we’re going to get there sooner or later.”
The doc’s basic sell is that attaining your mountain-climbing (or more precisely mountain-skiing) dream is such an ecstatic thing that common sense is something to be rigorously avoided at all costs. The doc literally celebrates this attitude.
On top of which the film struck me as evasive if not dishonest in terms of conveying the basic facts about two horrible tragedies that befell mountaineering athlete Jim Morrison — (a) the September 2022 avalanche-related death of Morrison’s wife Hilaree Nelson, and (b) the 2011 plane crash death of Morrison’s first wife, private pilot Katie Morrison, near Barstow — a tragedy that also killed Jim and Katie’s two small children, Wyatt and Hannah.
The astounding feat of not just scaling the north face of Mount Everest in the face of horrific winds and sudden avalanches but compounding the risk by attempting to ski down the Everest slope…c’mon!
Everest-skiing strikes me as the height of privileged, Telluride-dwelling rich-person arrogance, and not too far in my mind from Alan B. Shepard‘s hitting a couple of golf balls on the moon.
I respect Mr. Morrison’s determination to push on despite nature and life itself repeatedly urging him to reconsider, but I despise his attempt to glorify this denial with optimistic, fairy-tale bromides about believing in your dreams, etc.
Official Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi statement: “Everest: The Other Side examines the trade-offs required to pursue extraordinary goals. We set out to make this film not only because Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson’s story grips you, but because Hilaree was a singular human being.
“After tragedy strikes, Jim makes a deliberate choice to fulfill their shared dream, offering a parable of how to endure grief. Seven years in the making, the film required documenting a near-impossible expedition to one of the most remote places on earth.”
All this aside, the doc’s cinematography is entirely breathtaking…congrats to Chin and Vasarhelyi on this score alone.