This year’s Venice film festival gets off to a disastrous start with a fact-based thriller that’s light on thrills

Following the 2014 and 2015 avalanche disasters that killed more than 35 people trying to scale the highest mountain on Earth, the timing is either wildly inappropriate or grimly right for “Everest,” though it would be awfully hard to argue that it’s too soon. A properly grueling dramatization of the ill-fated May 1996 expedition that saw eight climbers expire in a blizzard, this brusquely visualized, choppily played epic serves as the latest cinematic opportunity for Mother Nature to flaunt her utter indifference to human survival. Achieving fitful flurries of emotion amid an otherwise slow, agonizing descent into physical and dramatic paralysis, director Baltasar Kormakur’s latest and biggest U.S. studio effort should ride its Imax 3D event-picture status to decent theatrical returns worldwide, aided by a topical resurgence of interest in the movie’s subject. Still, with its more stolid than inspired execution, it’s unclear whether the Sept. 18 Universal release can reach its desired commercial apex.

shauner111 wrote:This movie looks like a comedy.