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MOUNTAIN
Director: Jennifer Peedom MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:14 Release Date: 5/11/18 (limited); 6/15/18 (wider) |
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Capsule review by Mark Dujsik | June 14, 2018 Jennifer Peedom's Mountain is less a documentary and more an audio-visual experience of images, words, and music. The images come primarily from cinematographer Renan Ozturk, with some archival footage of the past. The words come with Robert Macfarlane, with Willem Dafoe serving as narrator. The music is a mixture of composer Richard Tognetti's original score and pieces of recognizable classical music. The central theme of the movie, as one might have guessed already, is the idea of the mountain—as a physical component of the geography of Earth, as a symbol of the planet's past and of humanity's relative insignificance in the history of the planet, as a means of seeking adventure and fun, as a representation of some spiritual force that elicits awe in the presence of the grandeur of mountains. It's all over the place, really, and one's appreciation for this collaborative effort is likely to be directly correlated to one's patience in seeing mountains filmed from various angles. The scattershot approach isn't aided by Macfarlane's script, which proffers generic observations amidst a collection of metaphors. The core idea, it seems, is that mountains were once held in fear and wonder, and now, they have become tourist destinations and the backdrops for stunts performed by thrill-seekers with corporate sponsorships. The idea of the mountain has become bastardized, essentially, although the movie quite enjoys its own brand of vicarious thrill-seeking—showing us climbers leaping between natural handholds, skiers outrunning an avalanche, and a tight-rope walker appearing to float in the air between two desert peaks. Some of this is, obviously, breathtaking, and there's a section of the movie that provides a fairly straightforward narrative about the history of mountain climbing, climaxing with modern shots at the base camp of Mount Everest, where death-defying has become a business. Even the mountain's angry uncle, the volcano, makes a few appearances later in the movie. Tognetti's music provides the only sense of cinematic momentum, as we mountain after mountain in sweeping aerial shots and adventurer after adventurer in vertiginous medium shots (One unexpected twist is that we see a decent number of falls and accidents). Mountain is occasionally beautiful and frightening, but its foundation is so flimsy that the movie never finds a justification for what it's showing us. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for perilous sports action, some injury images and brief smoking)
