Nelson’s death immediately raises questions among everyone working on the project, including Morrison and the filmmakers, about whether it’s sensible to continue. “How many people have eaten at our dinner table who’ve died?” Vasarhelyi asks Chin. At the time, the filmmakers were married. “That might take a while,” he responds. When the numbers of dead are this high, it’s easy to become inured and feel it’s just part of the game. But it’s not remotely a game, as Morrison’s now-motherless stepchildren know all too well. How can any of this be justified? The project does move forward, though, with Chin himself stepping in to take Nelson’s place on the Everest climbing team. There are more struggles and even accidents along the way, but the documentary’s style implicitly assures us: There might have been one death, but Morrison will climb that mountain and ski down it in the end. There would be no film otherwise, at least not this film.
Free Solo had similar built-in assurances, but the particular obsession on display in that film, the nature of its stunt, and the fact that there were no children back home to worry about made its examination of a single person’s taste for the extreme a deliciously compelling piece of portraiture. It’s clear in that film that Alex Honnold won’t die, so it’s all easy enough to stomach (though the incredible shots looking down the cliff face might not be). Everest: The Other Side offers no such distance from mortality, and its portraiture hardly makes up the difference. Rather than deal directly with a climber’s compulsion to abandon or even hurt family—we’re talking about children—Chin and Vasarhelyi take their cues from Morrison, whose self-justifications may or may not be understandable, but are never interrogated seriously.
After Nelson’s death, the documentary’s story becomes one of regaining confidence and persevering through tragedy, including a late reveal that Morrison was previously married and lost his wife and two children in a plane crash. Its deployment is unseemly, a narrative strategy to paint Morrison in a more generous light than if the audience had been given the information at the outset. And while Chin becomes an active character in the film, Vasarhelyi retreats back, and their conversation about whether it’s wise for him to do the climb is never really addressed again. It’s an odd choice, and one likely to raise a few eyebrows when coupled with the fact that the pair divorced in 2025, the year that Morrison and Chin made their expedition. If a documentary is meant, in some senses, to be honest, like Free Solo felt, Everest: The Other Side is a letdown, its staggering images aside.
Tenzing Norgay had kids, too. Yet Peedom’s film about him doesn’t come across as an exculpatory effort. Tenzing has history to contend with. Ask most people who the first to climb Everest was, and the name Edmund Hillary is likely the only one you’ll hear. Tenzing is the corrective to that narrative. Hillary was the first to set foot on the peak, but he did so accompanied by Norgay, with whom he also formed a deep friendship. Luke Davies’ script makes their friendship the film’s beating heart. Disrespected and discriminated against by the various groups of Europeans attempting expeditions up the mountain, Norgay finds kinship in Hillary, a New Zealander who, despite his relatively immense privilege, is nonetheless also discriminated against by his British superiors. So much for keeping the “common” in “Commonwealth.”
What the two discover in each other is a passion that’s quite different from most of the mountaineers in their company. For the British, submitting Everest is a form of conquering, an expression of their imperial attitude toward claiming the world. Norgay and Hillary, both of whom grew up surrounded by mountains, feel a more spiritual urge. They know the mountain, but they want to know it. They want to commune with the world’s natural wonder and feel a part of it. To reach the peak of Everest becomes a humbling experience, and the film’s surprising power rests in that idea. Summiting Everest might be crazy, and it might come along with myriad ethical concerns, from personal safety to the imperial and industrial realities of mountain climbing, but it has meaning beyond individual narcissism. Being the first to reach the top of Everest may have been a victory for Britain, but the men who did it weren’t British. In their way, they represented the world, and their success was a quite pure manifestation of the human desire to be at peace with nature.
Tenzing does bog itself down in other ways. It pulls typical biopic moves, intercutting the story of the 1953 expedition with moments from Norgay’s life, starting from childhood. The structural conceit is rote, sometimes to the point of eye-rolling, particularly near the end when flashbacks feel like interruptions. Still, there’s a simple dad-movie pleasure in how everything unfolds, and when the film needs to be affecting, it gets there. That the film leaves certain ethical questions to the side is made up for by its attention to more systemic problems in the world of mountaineering, even 73 years ago, well before Everest would see nearly 1,000 people make the climb annually.
Everest: The Other Side does itself no favors in this respect either. Surrounding Morrison’s stunt is the fact that summiting Everest is no impressive feat anymore. Though people still regularly die on the mountain, the support systems on the Southwest face have allowed rivers of people to tour their way up the mountain, leaving behind untold debris, along with serious questions about the treatment of the local Sherpa and the general exploitation of people and our environment. None of this is addressed seriously in the documentary. It’s all mere setup for why the North Face is the one to attempt, and even then Morrison needs to ski down it to make his expedition in any way special. Its meaning, despite the film’s feints at universalism, come across as almost maniacally individualistic.
Fascination with achieving the impossible is nothing new, and being the world’s highest peak makes Everest a particularly compelling challenge and stories about it have a natural draw. Each in their way, these two films about the peak reflect that fascination right back to us, for good and ill. Everest: The Other Side, with its frequently jaw-dropping footage, presents a hyper-American story of Everest as a site for personal striving and achievement. It turns the mountain into just another thing for us to dominate and then feel good about having done so. Tenzing, for its part, may feel like a more standard affair, but offers a view of the mountain as something more collectively inspiring. The will to reach the top, despite all the complications inherent (and in some ways because of them), speaks to a spiritual oneness with our environment. We are a part of nature, and that demands humility from climbers and filmmakers alike—especially at 29,000 feet.
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