Everest

A team assembled, leaders guiding both veterans and new recruits, with goals of ascension, summits, their lives held in trust, clutching the ropes, struggling with shock, slowly and steadily moving one foot forwards, circulatory stamina, keeling, as a storm sets in.

It's sometimes but not often the case that strictly adhering to every rule at all times doesn't encourage smooth workflows in the civilian domain, in work-a-day realms where your life isn't directly threatened, but Baltasar Kormákur's Everest warns that when engaged in high stakes adventuring, adhering to the rules is a best practice at all times.

Years of successfully leading the bold up Mount Everest have left both Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) and Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal) feeling invincible, and although steps are taken to ensure health and safety, crucial factors are ignored, for which they pay a strict penalty.

One heart has grown too big.

Another simply thinks he can do anything.

Everest succeeds as a majestic unpretentious accessible quest, relying on will and determination to motivate its operandi, the rationality of the insurmountable, brashly grappling with its cause.

I was worried that it would unreel like a horror film, the mountain claiming its victims one by one, due to the ways in which it introduced most of its characters, but it isn't like that at all, the storm rather menacing the group as one.

As nature formidably contests, there's a sense of incomparable awe.

A force too omnipresent to dread.

Inspiring images of climate change.

Cinematography by Salvatore Totino.