by Rich Elias, Oct 1, 1998

• 43 Minutes
• 3 Stars

The technology is impressive, and so is the theater. The IMAX screen is bigger than the eye can encompass, which gives the movie an illusion of depth, almost 3D. They tell me the IMAX projector bulb gets as hot as the surface of the sun. Is that possible? But what it projects, in the 426 seat theater, will make your eyes pop out.

"Everest" tracks an American expedition determined to scale the highest mountain in the world, following the same route Sir Edmund Hillary took when he conquered the peak in 1953. As if to reinforce the connection, this Everest expedition included Jamling Tenzing Norgay, son of Hillary's Sherpa guide.

Director David Brashears, an accomplished mountaineer as well as a filmmaker, followed the American team up the mountain with tons of equipment, including a portable IMAX camera. "Everest" lets us follow the climbers along ice flows, across crevasses miles deep, and past a mountain panorama which shows us what the world looks like when viewed from the highest point on earth. The giant IMAX screen magnifies the thrill of looking down on the world from its very top.

"Everest" is spectacular. But that doesn't mean it's a good movie. Most IMAX movies, "Everest" included, are jaw-droppers: you sit there aghast at what you're seeing. On the other hand, these movies depend on the power of the vistas they display, not on story or character.

Yes, it seems petty to complain, but consider this: this expedition, in spring 1996, was on the mountain when a blizzard killed eight climbers on another team heading toward the summit. (I think this was the expedition described in Jon Krakauer's best-seller "Into Thin Air".) "Everest" tells us what happened to that expedition. But because the movie is a documentary and a spectacular, it is in a special kind of straight jacket: it can't show us anything its IMAX cameras haven't seen, and it points those cameras mainly at awesome vistas.

If you think about it, the real drama occurs elsewhere while "Everest" focuses on heroics it can put on film. I'm not denying it takes guts to assault the Himalayas. But you get the feeling that, with a half dozen or so groups huddled in base camp waiting their turn to go up the mountain, scaling the mountain isn't as heroic as it used to be. And scaling it in the company of a movie team is even less so. Meanwhile, just beyond the camera's lens, eight people are dying.

With tragedy as an unseen backdrop, the movie's claims about this team seem overblown, particularly the description of Araceli Segarra as "the first woman from Spain to ascend Mount Everest," repeated two or three times in the 43-minute movie. She is strong and courageous, no doubt, but that description makes us think she's not the first woman, nor the first Spanish climber to take the summit.

Segarra is probably much more modest about her achievement than the makers of "Everest." And that is the problem. Everything about "Everest" just has to be as big as its subject, even when that's not possible. None of these questions will or should bother most moviegoers, who expect and get an oh-wow experience. But I wonder if IMAX is much like the oh-wows of the 1950s, introduced when TV first cut into the moviegoing audience, technologies like Cinerama and Vistavision and Cinemascope. Their goal was to lure us away from our TV sets. So Cinerama put us on roller coasters, 3-D movies showed us African natives hurling spears right at the audience, CinemaScope showed us B-52's flying across a wide screen. Most of these were terrific spectacles but mediocre movies. So is "Everest."