Review - Everest

The Himalayas are an astonishing sight (or so I assume – never been there), and Mt. Everest reigns supreme. Drawing climbers from around the globe with the tantalizing challenge of standing at the very top of the world, Earth's highest mountain inspires awe, but what it deserves even more is reverence.
Beautiful things can be deadly, and this is no place for those who fear death.

It was a tragic lesson learned in the spring of 1996 when two commercial mountaineering outfits became stranded on the summit in the midst of a ferocious blizzard. Everest dramatizes this catastrophe extensively, cobbled together from what survivor accounts could be disseminated.

Unknown director Baltasar Kormákur was probably the least expected name to oversee a big-budget fall studio project with a large, starry cast. Accordingly, the movie he's delivered is not quite what you'd expect either. In fact, it's harder to peg down than ropes to an ice face in whiteout conditions.

Review - Unbroken

Louie Zamperini has an incredible life story to tell. The odds were already stacked against him from a young age, growing up as one of four children of an immigrant family in Depression-era California. In spite of this, he made a name for himself as a competitive distance runner, represented America in the Berlin Olympics, served his country as a bombardier in WWII, survived a plane crash that left him stranded for 47 days in the Pacific Ocean, and lived out the remainder of the war in a Japanese POW camp under the harshest conditions imaginable.

Just that cursory synopsis of his bio is enough to make one wonder why his life story hasn't been made into a major motion picture already, but we finally get one in the form of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, which arrived on Christmas Day. Zamperini passed away in July at 97 years of age, and while no one wants to rain on the posthumous parade of a man who endured through so much struggle, the sad reality is that an incredible true story does not necessarily an incredible movie make.

Unbroken is just not that good a film; A clichéd exercise that reaches for artificial inspiration while saying very little about the figure who serves as its subject. The problem is not in the story, but in the storytelling, as it fails to shape Zamperini's harrowing saga into any kind of effective structure.