Into Thin Air: Death on Everest
by Robert Markowitz
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DVD details
Actor: Christopher McDonald, Nathaniel Parker, Peter Horton, Richard Jenkins, Tim DuttonDirector: Robert Markowitz
Brand: HORTON,PETER
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Georgian (Subtitled); Chinese (Subtitled); Thai (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Dubbed), Unknown; Portuguese (Dubbed), Unknown; Spanish (Dubbed), Unknown
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
Published: 2001-05-01
DVD Release Date: 2001-05-22
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Into Thin Air: Death on Everest
DVD Review: OK, but doesn't live up to Jon's account
Summary: 3 Stars
Having read Jon Krakauer's Everest memoir, Into Thin Air, I decided to get the DVD of the movie. The movie version of Jon's book isn't bad, but I think it falls just a little short of Jon's written account of his climb up Everest in '96.
In the movie, Christopher McDonald plays Jon; Nat Parker plays Rob Hall, the leader of Jon's Everest climb; and Peter Horton plays Scott Fischer, the leader of a rival group of climbers. As in the book, the movie details how a lack of oxygen, small mistakes, and Rob and Scott's eagerness to get to the top--and pressing on despite storms brewing near Everest's summit--combined to cause the disaster. Among the mistakes laid out in the movie were Scott's Sherpa guide Lopsang towing climber Sandy Pittman by rope even though he hadn't been instructed to do so and Jon's fellow climber Andy Harris accidentally turning up the regulator on Jon's oxygen tank full blast while suffering forgetfulness brought on by a lack of oxygen. Also, Rob disregarded his own turnaround time of 2:00 p.m., which everybody on his team had agreed to so that they'd have time to get back down safely even if not all of them reached the top of Everest by that time. Indeed, as depicted in the book and the movie, Jon and his guide Mike Groom were the only two people from Jon's expedition who reached the summit and then got off Everest alive. However, the movie also includes the inspiring story of Jon's colleague Beck Weathers, who, despite nearly dying from frostbite, walked into camp one day after everyone had given up on him and eventually recovered. Beck, as the ending shows, lost his right hand and all the fingers on his left hand and underwent the reconstruction of his nose, but he still was able to return to his work as a doctor. The most memorable scenes are Beck's near-death experience and miraculous recovery; the scene where Jon ran out and banged on pots and pans to guide the climbers who had gotten lost after the disastrous storm on Everest; Rob's dying phone conversation with his wife, Jan, who was pregnant and was talking to him from New Zealand; and the closing scene, the memorial service at Everest Base Camp for the climbers who perished on the mountain. The scenery is majestic, and I got a sense of the climbers' desperation as they struggled just to survive on Everest.
However, the movie version of Into Thin Air, in my opinion, doesn't do the book justice. For one thing, the movie was mainly concerned with what happened on Everest and not how the characters got there. To be sure, it's hard to get all the details of a book into a 90-minute to two-hour movie. However, in the movie version of Into Thin Air, we don't really get to know the characters personally. There's just a brief exposition before the climbing scenes commence. In my opinion, Rob, Nat Parker's character, is more interesting than Jon(as played by Christopher McDonald) or Scott(as Peter Horton portrays him). Rob's New Zealand humor provides occasional comic relief for an otherwise dull--and eventually tragic--situation. Also, since we hear Rob talking to his wife on the phone just before he dies, we get a sense of how much he loved his family. We don't hear Jon conversing with his wife back in the United States, even though in the book, he and Linda had phone conversations on numerous occasions--and Jon, in the book, is the protagonist and author! I think, too, that the movie understates Jon's emotional reactions to what happened. In the book, Jon was overcome with grief and guilt at the loss of his friends. In the movie he's portrayed as a self-absorbed guy who went up the mountain because of personal ambition--and when his friends(Andy, Rob, Scott, Doug Hansen, and Yasuko Namba) start dying, we don't see him exhibit any anguish. Indeed, in the movie, Jon cracks up only twice: the first time when he is standing over Rob's frozen body, and again at the very end, when he talks about his dead friends at the Base Camp memorial service. The movie's portrayal of Jon, in my opinion, is demeaning. In the book Jon wanted to get up Everest very badly--almost at the exclusion of anything else--but he still grieved for his friends. Furthermore, I think that in at least one place in the movie, there's some obvious stretching of the truth. The scene where I most doubt the credibility of director Robert Markowitz and writer Robert Avrech is the scene where Jon, having failed to rescue Rob, discovers the latter's frozen body. In the written account, Jon did not try to go after Rob because he(Jon) was shivering in his tent and concerned with his own survival. Anatoli Boukreev, a guide on Scott's team, was the one who coordinated most of the rescue attempts on the mountain. Rob's body was actually found some time later by climbers Ed Viesturs and David Breashears as they were making their way to the top of Everest. Also, I think the filmmakers' portrayal of Anatoli, one of the heroes of the expedition, is off base, although the movie truthfully recounts his heroism in the wake of the storm. Anatoli, as Jon wrote, was a dedicated guide who helped find several of the climbers who were lost, even though he had to descend ahead of his teammates because his rescue attempts used up a lot of his oxygen. Markowitz and Avrech portray Anatoli as a "he-man" type--boorish, uncooperative, and sometimes argumentative. In one scene, Anatoli and Scott get into a heated fight over Anatoli's responsibilities as a guide. Although Anatoli got criticized for the way he did his job and for descending ahead of his team after the storm, I didn't see any open hostility between him and Scott when I read the book. Another discrepancy between the book and the movie is that in the book, Rob didn't see the Taiwanese climber as the climber came out of his tent shod only in his boot liners and slid down the mountain to his death. The Taiwanese group was on Everest at the same time as Rob's and Scott's teams but didn't go up the mountain at the same time. Finally, the movie stops after the memorial service and doesn't include Jon's adjusting to life back in the United States. I concede that the movie is an abridged version of Jon's book. However, in real life, Jon had to deal not only with missing his dead friends and getting used to being at home again but with the hate mail he received after writing the magazine article which was the impetus for his book. As Jon wrote, the hatred coming from the pens of his critics made the aftermath of his Everest climb even harder to deal with than it already was. Markowitz and Avrech completely overlooked this part of Jon's story--and I think that the criticism Jon received, not just for the role he played in the deaths of his friends but for going up Everest in the first place, was a key element in his book. Still, as an adventure story, the movie Into Thin Air is not great, but it's all right. The movie, like the book, shows us how people react in a desperate situation and how even little things we do can have big consequences.
Description of Into Thin Air: Death on Everest
Re-creates the true-life struggle for survival on top of the world's highest mountain on May 10, 1996.Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: NR
Release Date: 31-AUG-2004
Media Type: DVD
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