Everest and The Green Inferno

My chances of seeing movies here in Hawaii before most people I know elsewhere see them are pretty slim.  Movies come slow to Hawaii, don't stay long, and often don't make it at all if there's not a wide, popular audience.  There is only one IMAX theater and that's an hour's drive away near downtown Honolulu, and it generally only shows large format, 3D movies only for a week.  I do like spectacle.  I also tend to wait until I can see movies with Robin, who's only here a week or so out of there month or occasionally with my friend Mark, who lives here in Makaha.

So my purpose in talking about movies here is to articulate to myself what I thought, and, maybe, to give friends who read this, who go to movies, or rent them, even more hesitantly than I do, an idea whether they want to go to the trouble. Or just to open up a conversation.

A few weeks ago--nearly month now, I went to see Everest because I was interested in the subject, it was going to be leaving the theater in Kapolei, only a half hour away, and I wanted to see it in 3D.  Robin had seen it in IMAX on a layover in Seattle and really urged me to see it.  He'd read John Krakauer's Into Thin Air a few years ago and his subsequent books as they came out; I read Thin Air after seeing the film along with Missoula and Under the Banner of Heaven in the last month.  I have stuff to say about him, and about his particular brand of book-length journalism, but I'll do it elsewhere. While Everest isn't based on the Krakauer book, it's impossible to think about the film without refering to Krakauer, who's a major character in the film and inevitably the foundation of what happened on the mountain in April 1996--now, incredibly, almost twenty years ago.

As it happened, I was feeling a little sorry for myself and incapacitated by the troubles I've been having with my hands, so after doing a few other errands in Kapolei, the closest town with a variety of suppliers of groceries, laundry, and household things and services (I'm working hard not to use the word "shopping" as I don't like to think of myself as a shopper) {I'm going to write about Kapolei another time, too--it's kind of a strange place} I went back to the theater after seeing Everest to see Eli Roth's The Green Inferno.  I'd seen Hostel, also by Roth, and knew I took a kind of scab-picking fascination with movies about pain and fear--at least the kind he makes.

At first blush the movies couldn't be more different.  Everest, in it's glaring, high altitude light and cold, is practically monochromatic in the Himalayan setting of most of the movie.  Inferno is, as the title suggests, green, humid lush and hot.  There's a lot of bright red gore , in addition to the cloying green in Inferno, too. Everest is ostensibly about heroism--there's precious little heroism in Inferno.  Everest has a big star cast and spectacular--in every sense of the word--production.

But I was shocked to find myself on the drive home pondering how much the two movies shared.  In both a group of relative strangers leave the first world for a place beyond the third. The protagonists in both depend on native people for their survival. In both movies there are survivors of life-threatening challenges (This shouldn't be a spoiler, by the way.) In both movies affable, less-than-major characters die horribly.  The protagonists have good intentions. The protagonists' good intentions are complicated and conflicted. In both the deus ex machina, in the form of it's own "machina," plays a critical role in survival. Both movies are "over the top" literally and figuratively.

Both movies are worth seeing with big "ifs."  Don't go to see Everest--especially in 3D or large format--if you suffer from vertigo.  Or in the winter. The movie is all about fear of falling and cold.  Though it's based on actual events, the movie allows itself a lot of latitude in interpreting events and--partly because of the compressed time in cinema--does real disservice to some of the characters who are reduced to the caricatures of a morality play--most notably Jake Gyllenhall's character,  Scott Fisher.  If you get a personal kind of heroism (one that's primarily concerned with self-interest) and  understand why someone would risk life and limb--again, literally, and I do get it--to pursue extreme sports (and this is genuinely extreme), then watch it. And man, it is spectacular, though much of the spectacle you can see in the preview. If you're after subtlety, read the (related) book.

The Green Inferno's is an even more specialized audience.  You have to appreciate horror and have a stomach for gross. And  you have to have a taste, as it were, for the particular kind of horror that Eli Roth represents.  That, and if you can get past the grotesque politically and anthropologically incorrect cannibalistic caricatures of Amazonian natives, than by all means have a look.  It's pretty good at what it intended to do: horrify and gross-out with surprisingly few surprises.