Touching the Void
by Kevin Macdonald
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DVD details
Actor: Brendan Mackey, Joe Simpson (II), Nicholas Aaron, Ollie Ryall, Simon YatesDirector: Kevin Macdonald
Brand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: AC-3, Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 106 minutes
Published: 2004-06-01
DVD Release Date: 2004-06-15
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
DVD Reviews of Touching the Void
DVD Review: Beyond the Beyond
Summary: 5 Stars
Picture Hell
Picture hell with your minds eye. Then picture yourself placed squarely within the depths of the devil's lair. Imagine the worst fear you have ever felt and couple this with the most painful experience you've ever been privy to.
Multiply that by 1000 and you still don't have an estimation of what the men in this story went through!
The Extremes
Joey Simpson and Simon Yates are the only men to ever successfully climb Mt. Siula Grande. Their feat has never been repeated. While watching this movie I realized why this is so. The terrain they chose to traverse is so hostile towards anything human that one wonders how they could even conceive to undertake the challenge.
2 men, minimal supplies, no backup, no support, no GPS tracking, no modern technology. This is how they chose to tackle the mountain. They did this in what seems to me, a bold and stoic stance in front of God while shouting:
Here I am, I am ready to vindicate my existence!
This, in my mind, is the greatest vindication of one's existence: To go against nature with no hope of survival, to stare certain death in the face, to encounter madness and still survive to tell the story.
Purists
The first 15 minutes of the movie is all about how they make it up the mountain. They chose to use the single push Alpine style of mountain climbing. In this style one does not scout the mountain and set up various camps and supply points throughout the proposed route. In this style, you carry all your supplies in your backpack and, in one powerful push, you climb up and down the mountain. It is, to quote Joe, the purest form of mountain climbing.
Saving My Brother
The descent, during which 80% of mountain climbing accidents occur, proved more perilous than the ascent. It is during the descent that Joe slipped and got injured, a fate which, under such conditions, is indicative of certain death for both climbers. The impact of his fall was so great as to almost split his leg in half!
It is here that Sam proved to be an exceptional human being. Instead of abandoning his colleague, as he was expected to, he attempts to get his partner to safety by lowering him down in 300 foot drops using a lengthy rope.
The situation quickly deteriorates and one accident follows another. Not only do they run out of gas and therefore water, but they also run out of any other supplies. At that point, the worst possible accident happens and Joe falls over a cliff edge and into a chasm.
The transformation
Great adversity often causes a change in a man. This psycho-emotional change is often marked by dramatic physical changes (as I've described before).
Sam assumes that his colleague is dead and cuts the rope that joins them. When he does make it to the basecamp, their travel mate notes the following:
You wouldn't recognize him.... He didn't look human....
In the meantime, Joe undergoes a trip to the very nadir of depression and back to the zenith of superhumanity. He gives up trying to climb out of the crevasse. He gives up waiting for benevolent help. He decides to do the impossible: He descends into the bottomless crevasse. This is the self same crevasse that he described thus:
....I tried to use my torch to look into the crevasse. It went down forever.... The darkness just completely swallowed the light...
When he eventually does make it out of the crevasse he finds that he has an entire glacier to traverse. The situation is exacerbate by the powder snow which completely covers the tracks left by his companion. He suffers from severe dehydration. The glacier is marked by snow patches that cover crevasses. One false step and you are guaranteed a certain and swift death.
The Guardian Angel Within
4 days later, crawling along on one leg, he makes it to the moraine which is covered with boulders. Every hop he makes there after results in him falling and injuring himself on the boulders. Yet, somehow, he makes it across and to the basecamp. Here's how he describes it:
...I set goals.. I decided to make it to the next boulder in 20 minutes.... It became obsessive...If I made it in less than 20 minutes I was overjoyed....If I took longer I would get mad at myself...
Later, he starts going mad. He hears voices and the pain becomes excruciating. He finds comfort in the warmth of wetting himself. He loses all human dignity. Even then, he talks of the calm, unfeeling, hard voice of infinity that urges him on;
...The voice would tell me to get up.."No time to rest, no time to nurse the pain".... The voice wasn't mine...My mind would just observe and take everything in... The voice would force me to move...
I Rescued Myself
Eventually, he makes it to the basecamp. He shouts Sam's name continuously. When their travel mate hears it he thinks the following:
...I could hear Joe's voice call out to Sam.... But that couldn't be because Joe was dead...And if he wasn't then whatever was out there could not be human...Having gone through what he had gone through, the creature that was out there could not be Joe, It couldn't be human
Summary
Challenging death in such a manner is the ultimate vindication of one's existence. To face God and come out a victor and an equal is the ultimate proof that we are made in his image. There's no luck involved in this ordeal. There is only heart.
Touching the Void is an excellent, priceless and timeless story. I urge everyone to read the book and watch the movie. It is guaranteed to leave tears in your eyes.
I'm going to buy both the book and the DVD. You should too. Trust me, it's worth it.
Description of Touching the Void
TOUCHING THE VOID - DVD MovieTo describe Touching the Void as a mountaineering documentary would be to do this breathtaking drama an injustice. By intercutting narration from the climbers themselves with a nail-biting reconstruction of their remarkable adventure in the Peruvian Andes, the film has the best of both genres: the authentic stamp of factual storytelling and the edge-of-the-seat tension of a dramatic movie.
In 1985, two British mountaineers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, embarked on a daring--arguably reckless in the extreme--attempt to climb the previously unconquered mountain Siula Grande. A mixture of overconfidence in their own abilities and underestimation of the climb's difficulties brought them to grief after the successful slog to the summit. What follows is an often harrowing account of their perilous descent.
Based on Joe Simpson's gripping book, the film boasts glorious widescreen photography of Siula Grande and its notorious glacier. Actors take the place of the two climbers for close-ups, though Simpson did return to Peru in order to reenact parts of his dreadful crawl back down the ice. The story of Simpson's almost-superhuman fortitude has become legendary in climbing circles, and even for viewers uninterested in mountaineering, Touching the Void is an astonishing slice of real-life drama, magnificently retold. --Mark Walker
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