For some reason, there are no great mountain-climbing films.
Hockey has “Slap Shot” and “Miracle.” Football has “North Dallas Forty” and “The Longest Yard” (the original, mind you, not that Adam Sandler sacrilege). Baseball literally has too many to count.
I took up mountain-climbing when I lived in the Sierra Nevada 35 years ago. I loved seeing how far I could push myself, seeing what I could accomplish if I pushed through my doubts. I went to many places where few people had ever stood, places where people aren’t necessarily supposed to be. I suppose I’ve climbed hundreds of 10,000-foot-plus peaks, mostly in California, Montana and Canada. I hope to climb a couple of mountains next summer in Banff.
For whatever reason, mountain-climbing movies are generally flops. “K2” was a wildly successful Broadway play, but it died at the box office with poor reviews. They’ve tried to make at least two movies about Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air,” but both were pretty bad.
I used to joke with a former boss about the two of us writing a screenplay about the life of George Mallory, who died high on Mount Everest in 1924, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed the mountain. Countless books have been written about Mallory and whether he and Sandy Irvine made the Everest summit in 1924, but amazingly, no one has ever tried to make a film about his life.
Anyway, I stumbled onto this French-Luxembourgish-Japanese movie on Netflix the other night, “The Summit of the Gods.” It isn’t perfect, but I think it’s the best mountaineering movie I’ve ever seen. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. You can watch it in French, Japanese or English.
To be clear, this is an animated film, in a Japanese anime style. It’s one of those artsy films that get submitted to the Cannes Film Festival. It’s amazingly gorgeous and some of the best animation I’ve ever seen. It’s also got some incredibly accurate scenes in how mountain-climbing actually works. And a pretty terrifying scene about what a person goes through when they’re experiencing high-altitude cerebral edema.
It’s based on a Japanese manga about a photojournalist trying to track down a reclusive, mysterious climber named Habu Joji, whom he thinks might be in possession of Irvine’s 1924 pocket camera. For the record, many, many people have scoured the slopes of Everest for years looking for this mythic camera. It’s never been found, but it’s believed the film might still be good in the cold and dry air of Everest, and it might show Irvine and Mallory at the summit 29 years before Hillary and Norgay.
The movie delves deep into the obsessiveness that drives these serious climbers. Joji is obsessed with finding routes that have never been done and is determined to make a solo summit of Everest up its dangerous southwest face in the dead of winter.
This is the part of the movie I could relate to. I obsessed on a 10,000-foot mountain in Montana called Trapper Peak for years. It took me three attempts and a lot of close calls to finally make the summit. It took me four tries to climb a peak in Banff called Mount St. Piran, going back there four straight summers to finally get decent enough weather to brave the summit.
The film shows some of the shocking death toll experienced by these serious climbers. A lot of people ask why these people take such risks. I’ve never done that kind of serious climbing, but my mom still hated my hobby and used to constantly ask me why I did it. She really thought it was crazy.
Sadly, she spent the last 20 years of her life parked in front of a television 16 hours a day, and all I could think to respond to her was, “Why do you watch TV all day?” I don’t think she ever understood me, and I certainly didn’t understand her and the TV.
The end of the film is a bit anti-climatic. The viewers don’t see any resolution to the mystery of Irvine and Mallory, but they might get an inkling about what drives and motivates people like Joji. It might not make sense to everyone, but you’re never 100 percent going to understand a mountain-climber.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
