Fans of grim mountaineering disasters are already familiar with the terrible outcome that met the 1996 Himalayan expedition season and is now the subject of this 40-minute IMAX film. Jon Krakauer's gripping bestseller Into Thin Air chronicled the unlucky convergences of incompetence and accident, of economies and attitudes, that led to the death of nine climbers in a brutal wind storm. Having little to add to this, filmmaker David Breashears instead allows his subjects to justify their expedition with some creaky platitudes about the self-knowledge gained through extreme personal challenge. Ironically, the film might have been more intriguing if it had merely chronicled its own creation. Aided by a handful of hearty peers and paid Sherpas, the director hauled a 42-pound camera up to an altitude where people suffer dehydration, muscle-decay, and aphasia as a matter of course--not to mention the 500-foot film rolls that needed to be loaded bare-handed in sub-zero temperatures. Yet the IMAX medium is perhaps the only one that can convey the astonishing scale of the mountain and the danger of its terrain, and in that sense Everest is truly a marvel. (Michael Tortorello)

Review by Michael Tortorello