By John Corrado
Everest: The Other Side is the latest thrill-seeking documentary from filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the team behind the Oscar-winning mountain climbing film Free Solo. Their latest is a surprisingly harrowing portrait of mountaineer Jim Morrison’s unstoppable journey to ski down the North Face of Mount Everest.
While many have scaled Mount Everest from the southeast side in Nepal, the North Face in China is a nearly impossible climb that very few have achieved. And nobody has ever successfully skied all the way back down. Morrison and his wife Hilaree Nelson, who are raising her two sons from a previous marriage, aim to be the first.
These directors are known for capturing death-defying spectacle. The bread and butter of their filmmaking is following subjects engaged in high-risk activities, something they have to grapple with here in an even more immediate way, including an intimate dinner table conversation about how many people they know who have died. This forces Everest: The Other Side to grapple with deeper questions about the line between exploitation and entertainment
The film looks great, especially when seen in IMAX, with the massive size of the screen able to capture the scope of Everest and what they are attempting to do by skiing down it. But the directors are thankfully capable of balancing the big screen spectacle with the deeper human story.
