Get your woollies on for this one (Touching The Void (DVD))

Member Name: cswann

Product:	Touching The Void (DVD)
Date:	08/03/04 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great story, Great panoramic views

Disadvantages: You already know what happens

In 1985 two young British lads, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, went to on a mountaineering trip to Peru, and attempted an ascent of the 21,000 foot high Sula Grande. No one had ever managed the route that they took, but they were young and fit, well-used to mountaineering, and full of enthusiasm and confidence.
This movie is a dramatisation of the events of their trip, taken from Simpson’s best selling book, also called “Touching the Void”.

Kevin Macdonald directs. His background is mainly making documentaries, one of which he won an Oscar for – 2000’s “One Day in September”, a documentary about the events at the 1972 Munich Olympics).
“Touching the Void” is a combination of documentary film, with re-enactments. Very much like “999” on TV, but much more cinematographic, of course.
Simpson is played by Brendan Mackey and Yates by Nicholas Aaron. Neither actors seem to have done a great deal of film work previously.

The real Simpson and the real Yates appear with frequent commentaries throughout the movie, making the whole thing much more poignant. This means that, from the beginning, we are aware that the 2 mountaineers do actually survive so in that sense there isn’t a great deal of suspense about what will happen, but in any case, it’s such a famous story, many viewers will already know the outcome.

(If you don’t know the story, and don’t want to know what happens – best stop reading NOW!)

They reached the top of the mountain, but that wasn’t the end of it.
The weather, which can change very quickly up there, took a turn for the worse, and both men were well aware that things – if they do go wrong – are far more likely
to go wrong on the descent than on the ascent.
And boy did they go wrong… Simpson had an accident, badly breaking his leg. Yates began to get them both back, painstakingly and heroically using ropes to get Simpson down the mountain, bit by bit.

Then another disaster struck, and with Simpson hanging over a sheer drop and his bodyweight threatening to take them both down, Yates was forced to cut the rope. That event was something that he took a lot of criticism for from the mountaineering community, and the story was famous internationally as well – most people with any interest in mountaineering will remember it clearly.
And just as famously, Simpson himself managed a superhuman crawl back to the base camp, despite him having many very painful injuries.

So, these events are already known to many who will be watching the movie, and even those who don’t know the story will guess much of it from the clips of the real Simpson and Yates, well before the end of it.
The suspense is more in how the events unfold.

I don’t usually like movies like this – I gave “Alive” and “Cliffhanger” a miss. But I found “Touching the void” was a surprisingly gripping, and affecting, movie to watch. Their feats of survival were truly heroic. Some would say they were foolhardy in the first place. But that’s another story.

There are some visually great scenes, whether they were all filmed at the Sukla Grande or not, they manage to give the impression that that’s what we’re seeing. Lots of great blue skies as they reach the top, make you feel some inkling of what it must feel like to be up there.
If I have any criticism at all it is merely that we don’t get to know the characters all that well – in a way, they could be any
two young men, and although we do get to know a lot of their inner thoughts, especially as they are coming terms with their respective isolated positions, I felt we could have been told more about them as people. What are they doing with themselves nowadays, for example? Do they still talk to one another?
Overall, recommended – but make sure you’re wrapped up warm!

106 minutes long.
Video available in April 2004, price = £10.39 on amazon.co.uk

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