If Cast Away almost takes the audience back to
the dawn of civilization, Vertical Limit--directed by Martin Campbell from a
screenplay by Robert King and Terry Hayes, based upon a story by King--takes its audience back to the days of
Pearl White. At the beginning of the film, the brother and sister Peter (Chris
O'Donnell) and Annie Garrett (Robin Tunney) are
climbing a mesa in the Southwest with their father when disaster strikes after a
climber above them falls, pulling the people immediately beneath them to their doom and leaving the
three barely attached to rock. The father, who is below the brother and sister,
convinced that three people cannot survive in the perilous situation, orders
Peter to cut the rope--in effect, sacrificing himself to rescue his children--and
his son only agonizingly complies after great soul-searching.
Years
later, Peter has given up climbing and become a professional photographer but
his sister is one of the most famous climbers in the world. While shooting snow
leopards in Pakistan, he learns that Annie is part of a nearby party funded by a
wealthy American, Elliot Vaughan (Bill Paxton) about to ascend K2. As a
result of the blundering of Vaughan, who wants to use the ascent to publicize a
new flying service he owns, the party encounters a severe snow storm which wipes
out most of the members and leaves Vaughan, Annie and their leader, Tom McClaren
(Nicholas Lea) stranded in a crevasse they have fallen into. This disaster, of
course, opportunely gives Peter a chance To Redeem his Manly Honor by leading a
party to rescue Sis and the other survivors.
Needless
to say, Vertical Limit subjects the rescue party to every possible catastrophe,
so much so that at one point I had the impression I was watching a remake of
Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, with the setting shifted to the
Himalayas. (The film makers even throw in some tricky canisters of
nitroglycerine that keep unpredictably detonating at the wrong moment.) The plot
further thickens when the treacherous Elliot reveals his true colors and does in
the injured Tom in order to guarantee his own chances of surviving.
Nevertheless, everything comes to a good end in the last reel when the Avenging
Angel Montgomery Wick (Scott Glen)--an old man of the mountains whose wife had
previously fallen victim to Elliot's machinations--guides Peter to Sis and does in the
villainous Vaughan.
Before continuing, I
would only mention in passing that anyone who wants to get a serious idea about
the dangers that constantly accompany climbing at great heights would do well to
look at the excerpt from Rick Ridgeway's book Below Another Sky that appeared in
Outside magazine in December 2000.
The excerpt describes his visit to Minya
Konka in China, in the company of Asia Wright to search for the body of her
father who had perished in a climbing expedition with Ridgeway and several other
people twenty years before.
What is there to say about a
movie whose hackneyed plot situations and vacuous dialogue come straight out of
The Boy's Guide to Screenwriting and whose often limp camera setups seem to be
taken from its companion volume, The Boy's Guide to Cinematography? But I must
admit that Vertical Climb for the most part is a straightforward adventure
flick, mercifully devoid of the bloated Wagnerian climaces and rhetorical
manipulation of Wolfgang Petersen's The Perfect
Storm, although I can't say much
for the musical score by James Newton Howard, which keeps unnecessarily
obtruding its presence on the soundtrack.
In
a movie like Vertical Limit, scenery is everything. The combination of location
photography (New Zealand doubling for Pakistan) and computer graphics gives the
film some of its best moments, when it gets away from the silly melodramatic
antics of the characters and contents itself with supplying endless vistas of
snow covered peaks. Even the cliffhanging special effects scenes are reasonably
exciting--it is only at the most basic level of dramatic credibility that
Vertical Limit fails, but that level is a necessary foundation for anything
resembling coherence in a work of entertainment as much as it is one of art.
Although
I am no outdoorsman, the main reason it occurred to me at all to go see this
movie was having read in the Los Angeles Times that the great American climber
Ed Viesturs appears in it. I had previously watched a remarkable hour long
interview with him on MountainZone.com.
He only gets a couple of speaking lines in the movie, and I don't foresee a
notable career for him as an actor, but Viesturs is a remarkably articulate
interview subject and it is a real pleasure to hear him talk about his
experiences. The interview is still available archived--go to MountainZone.com,
click on "Climb," look for "Special Features" on the
left-hand side of the page, and then click on "Interviews"--and the
same issue of Outside that contains the Ridgeway excerpt also carries quite a
good article on Viesturs by Craig Vetter.
Ed
Viesturs
also shows up in--and partly narrates--a very different motion picture, the IMAX®
Everest***
documentary--directed by David Brashears, Greg MacGillivray, and Stephen
Judson--which records the ill-fated 1996 ascent of Everest in which several
climbers lost their lives, the same disaster reported by Jon Krakauer, who was a
member of the party, in his book Into Thin Air. In my review of the IMAX®
Adventures
in Wild California, I mentioned my less than enthusiastic response to
the MacGillivray-Freeman
style of filmmaking, but the picture is well-worth a look, although
burdened with a musical score as obnoxiously boomy as Vertical Limit's. Unimproved by
computer wizardry, IMAX® Everest's shots of monumental, icy
alpine wastes that resemble
an abstract painting suddenly given stereographic immediacy
easily transcend anything Vertical Limit has to offer. What these brief shots
reveal is a fading glimpse of the sublime--the
Alpenglühen of a once potent aesthetic concept.
The
concept of the sublime first appeared in a treatise entitled Peri Hupsous,
attributed to the rhetorician Longinus (213-273 CE), where it is used primarily to describe an
elevated literary or oratorical style--in its lapidary formulation, "Sublimity lies in intensity."
The concept lay dormant for several centuries until the poet and critic Nicolas
Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711) translated Longinus' work into French, but it
gained increasing prominence in the aesthetic speculations of the eighteenth
century, and received a new inflection in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). By
Burke's time the concept had already been expanded beyond the limits of art into
the realm of nature. But
he begins his discussion of the sublime in the Enquiry with the highly
un-classical declaration that
"The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those
causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state
of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of
horror." (I am considerably indebted to J.H. Boulton's Introduction to his
edition of the Enquiry--from which I quote--for this information.)
After
Burke, the sublime was not--as it had been before--just what was imposing but
what inspired the observer with terror, and this new definition often seemed most at
home on the peaks. Immanuel Kant, distancing himself from the subjectivism of
Burke in his Critique of Judgment (1790) maintained (§26) that "the true
sublime must be sought in the spirit of the person judging, not in the natural
object that occasions this judgment." Yet Kant immediately falls back upon
the image of "unformed mountainous masses, piled up on one another in
wild disorder, with their ice pyramids," when he wants to conjure up a
natural object capable of producing such an effect on the observer. And
something of this same sense of the sublime as deeply awe-inspiring certainly
underlies such uncanny landscapes of Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) as The Wreck of
'Hope' .
No
one would have to look far to find reasons for the demise of the sublime.
It was always a matter of scale, and two historical developments have radically
altered the human perception of that scale. First of all, the progress of
science and technology has reduced the world to increasingly modest dimensions. In the eighteenth century, traveling in the Alps was the
prerogative of wealthy gentlemen making the Grand Tour; today, the most exotic locales on
the face of the Earth can be reached by anyone with the money for a plane
ticket. Secondly, hardly any natural wonder--or even natural disaster--can seem
very horrifying in comparison with the catastrophes human beings have inflicted
on one another in modern times. And who would be so crazy as to describe the
horrors of the Third Reich or of Stalinism as "sublime"?
But
the heights of great mountains remain almost an exempted zone from these
processes--like a reservation on which a tiny bit of the sublime continues to
survive. The slopes of Everest, K2, or Annapurna are still the territory of
those privileged by training and fortitude to venture there. In the foreseeable
future, the combination of cost and the technical skill required for making an
ascent should protect great mountain ranges from being turned into another
Disneyland for bored tourists. Until that dread day arrives, those of us who are
not climbers will have to get our thrills vicariously by watching IMAX®
Everest, which is available on an excellent DVD that includes outtakes and
a documentary on the making of the movie. (The DVD and Into Thin Air by Jon
Krakauer are both available at a reduced price from Amazon.com.)
Production
data courtesy of Internet Movie Database
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