Touching the Void
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Movie Reviews of Touching the Void
Movie Review: An amazing story of tenacity, will, and dumb luck
Summary: 5 Stars
I heard about this film on Ebert & Roeper and was very intrigued. While the events in this movie happened in 1985 and became the subject of a million seller book in 1987, this was the first I had heard about Joe Simpson and Simon Yates.
At the time of this story they were tough, even brash, young adventurers in their early twenties who had decided to take on the previously unclimbed 21,000 foot Siula Grande in Peru. Can you imagine such a decision from men, one 25 and another not quite 22? Of course, it always such young men who possess the gift of a sense of immortality and indestructibility that have always taken on these impossible tasks.
The climb was harder than they had anticipated, and things were getting dangerously severe on their way down, when disaster struck: Joe fell and broke his leg. Simon decided to try to help his friend down and they worked out a method that got them a long way down, but their luck ran out. Joe was lowered over a sheer drop and could not pull himself up nor could Simon pull him back. The howling wind made it impossible for them to communicate with each other. They were trapped in a deadly situation with almost no way out.
After waiting for hours, Simon, who would surely have died if he stayed where he was, made the hard decision to survive and cut the rope to Joe. Joe fell a long way and crashed through the ice into a crevasse and fell some more onto a narrow ledge. It turns out the Simon's decision saved both their lives, but at the time Simon looked for Joe's body assuming he was dead. He couldn't find Joe and struggled back to camp, frostbitten and distraught over the loss of Joe.
How Joe survived would be unbelievable in a work of fiction. It is an amazing true story of tenacity, will, and even dumb luck.
This movie combines the participants telling the story in their own voices with actors re-enacting the events. Having the story told by the ones who lived through it gives the story an immediacy and veracity that actors alone could never provide, and seeing the stories portrayed as the story is being told to you makes their words more vivid. Combined, the story is made more immediate, real, and heart pounding.
If you like stories of adventure, determination, and overcoming impossible odds, this is as fine a story as you are likely to find.
Amazing.
There are three featurettes on the DVD that make this all even better: 1) The making of the movie, 2) The Return to Siula Grande, 3) What Happened Afterwards.
Movie Review: Remarkable film, unforgettable tale
Summary: 5 Stars
To give you an idea how profoundly this film touched me...I began watching it late one night, and I had to go to bed with about 45 minutes left to go. I hesitated for a good moment before stopping the DVD -- I didn't want to leave Joe stuck on the mountain! I finished it the absolute first chance I had...I got up early the next morning.
Kevin Macdonald's accomplishment is as gripping as the story is captivating. I basically knew what was going to happen, but I became completely engrossed in Joe's ordeal. I wept at the end.
The cinematography and the merging of editing/film techniques add an other-worldly aire to scenes, not as a gimmick as comes across in many other films but as a vehicle to bring us into Joe's ordeal. The fact that we hear the actual voices of the men involved lends an urgency that only documentary filmmaking can bring. In one of the extras, Macdonald admits that he hates documentary recreations, but I've never seen them done quite this way before. The authenticity of the actors and the scenery are so compelling that it is easy to forget that it is staged.
But what will stay with me for the longest time after witnessing this film is the complexity of relationship that the film captures. I honestly didn't know who I liked when the story first got going. By the end, those feelings had become even more ambiguous and complicated. And then I watched the "Making of" featurette, which served to further muddy the waters of the interrelationship of these characters. Relationships are messy as are human emotions. Throw in moral choice and you find plenty of fuel for discussion and personal growth from the story. I found myself being soft on Joe and hard on Simon, and Richard was often just annoying.
The story and experience is so full of pathos and angst, I just wish the men, especially Simon, would be more forthcoming and vulnerable. But is suppose that is the antithesis of the mountainclimber mystique. In many ways this film dares us to touch the void that is humanity.
This is one I'm going to buy.
Movie Review: One of the most dramatic movies I've seen in a long time - no spoilers
Summary: 5 Stars
When I hear the word "docudrama," I usually laugh and think of the silly reenactments on CourtTV. I also think of prisoners and prison guards strutting before a camera, trying hard to make their lives and worlds significant to the law-abiding (or mostly law-abiding) people at home on their couches. There's a lot of flashing, fear-flavored graphics and sound effects, nauseating camera zooms, and an overbearing narrator manufacturing gravitas. The stories are compelling, but it's the manner in which they are presented that strikes me wrong. There's no "drama," but rather a cheap off-brand, melodrama, and the overall effect is one of flaccid entertainment instead of genuine humanity.
Touching the Void captures the true scope of a docudrama project. The goal is to as accurately as possible recreate the impossible. Director Kevin MacDonald's blend of gorgeous footage with crisp sound effects made me physically colder just watching and listening to them.
The best parts of the movie are those where the viewer feels that the director is attempting something new. Most of the film is a straightforward docudrama where the real-life people participate with artists in documenting and recreating the drama of an ordeal. There are moments, however, when artistic license intensifies the truth. Perhaps an ice axe tings sharply, and the sound seems to glisten like sunlight off the surrounding snow. My favorite, however, is when MacDonald accurately films what it's like to have a song truly lodged in your head. At that moment, I felt like I was watching and listening to something new.
There are plenty of movies about mountain climbing. Recent Everest expeditions on the Discovery Channel are intense: deformations from frostbite, poor decision-making in delirium, and even a climber's frozen death. As exciting as those Discovery Channel documentaries are, they still feel like prison melodramas to me. In Touching the Void, there's no real base camp or tanks of oxygen, just two young men moving up a large rock no one had ever climbed back in 1985.
Movie Review: Yup, I'm a wuss - and proud of it
Summary: 5 Stars
Watching TOUCHING THE VOID, I was reminded of the dangers that face Real Men. This was after I chipped a nail while opening a can of non-alcoholic brew. But, at least my Mommie was sympathetic.In 1985, two twenty-something Brits, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson, endeavored to climb the 21,000 foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Climbing successfully to the top was easy compared to getting back down, during which Simpson falls off an ice wall driving a shin bone up through the kneecap and splitting his femur. The only good news is that the skin wasn't broken. As Simon subsequently struggles to get the two of them back off the peak, cruel bad luck and circumstance contrive to pitch Joe into a crevasse. Thinking his friend dead, Simon staggers into base camp and prepares to return home. In the meantime, Simpson, still alive, must either go it alone or face certain death from exhaustion and dehydration. Being "between a rock and a hard place" takes on new meaning.
Since this pseudo-documentary begins with interviews with the real Simon and Joe, the audience knows from the start that the latter lives. But that fact doesn't detract from the nail-biting nature of this superb depiction of dogged perseverance and survival recreated by the climbers' own words paired with a brilliant re-enactment of the story both in Peru and in the Alps in which Nicholas Aaron stars as Simon and Brendan Mackey as Joe. The visual link between the four is seamless because the actors are beat-up and sun and wind-burned to the point of being unrecognizable anyway. The climbing scenes, filmed by Kevin Macdonald at night and during storms as necessary to remain true to the story, are perhaps some of the best you'll ever see.
The only other film that comes to mind which gives real-life testimony to Man's remarkable ability to survive against the most terrible of Nature's odds is the THE ENDURANCE (2002), a brilliant chronicle of Ernest Shackleton's doomed 1914-1916 expedition to the South Pole.
My easy chair and the trashy novels I read for vicarious thrills have never looked so inviting.
Movie Review: "WHEN MAPS LIE"-Mark Twight, renowned alpinist/author
Summary: 5 Stars
I got that quote from Mark Twight's book Extreme Alpinism. He was describing a climb that he and his friends completed in Pakistan which took two days longer to complete because the altitude given for the peak they climbed was actually 4,000 feet higher than the map indicated. Joe Simpson and Simon Yates similarly tread through unchartered routes, climbing through and over ice fields and dodging crevasses; no one had ever summited the 21,000-foot peak Siula Grande in the Andes mountains of Peru. They made it without mishap to the top; the trouble started up top when they started down and ran into some weather, slowly fumbling their way down despite white-out conditions. The next bad luck was Joe's first fall which broke his leg very badly causing internal bleeding, at still extreme altitude, in still white-out conditions. The rest of the story is a literal crawl/slide descent for Joe whose ordeal this movie is mainly about; it's a miracle he survived at all given the conditions his body was in for the next 4 or 5 days without food, water, or shelter. I'm a novice to all this mountaineering stuff, but I have heard much about this movie from mountaineers I've met. I think this movie is one that those folks have seen more than 2 or 3 times. The movie really captures the thoughts, feelings, pathos of mountaineers who find themselves in a trying, do or die, situation in which those emotions are not only amplified at high altitude, but they're also distorted somewhat because of the high altitude. As the story is reenacted by actors, Joe and Simon discuss what transpired during their wilderness ordeal. And as other reviewers have noted, Simon was criticized by the climbing community for cutting the rope from which Joe was being lowered down, though both Joe and Simon agree that they thought it was reasonable given the circumstances.
This film is a great adventure/true story even if you have no interest in mountaineering; it's great exercise, although that was probably the last thing on these young men's minds during this trial by ice.