A disaster movie played out at 35,000 feet, Everest is essentially a true-life Cliffhanger, less the criminal schemes and Craig Fairbrass shouting about soccer. The film’s first trailer lends a sense of nature’s awe to the derring-do of a small band trying to scale the Earth’s highest point. Then things go wrong. Very, very wrong...
Far from keeping its powder dry, Universal’s first trailer plunges us straight into to the freezing chaos of a fateful summit climb. The story is loosely inspired by real events (the 1996 disaster recounted in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air) and sees Jason Clarke leading a party of climbers up the Nepalese monolith as Kiwi mountaineer Rob Hall. Alongside him on the slopes are Josh Brolin as Doctor Beck Weathers, John Hawkes as Doug Hansen and Jake Gyllenhaal as Scott Fischer, the leader of a separate expedition. Things are progressing nicely, with most of the climbers reaching the summit, when warnings of dangerous weather conditions begin to come to fruition. Swiftly, it becomes a battle for survival.
The screenplay is penned by Mark Medoff (Children Of A Lesser God) and Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), with director Baltasar Kormákur overseeing a shoot that took in the Italian Alps, Cinecittà and Pinewood. Robin Wright, Michael Kelly, Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley and Emily Watson round out the cast.
Everest arrives in 3D and on IMAX from September 24, 2015.