Meru

Meru is a sacred mountain in India, the headwaters of the Ganges.  At 21,000 feet, it is dome of stone and ice bladed like a stegosaurus at the crest of its hump.  The most sheer and tallest blade is called "the shark's fin" and, until 2012, had never been climbed.  Meru is a documentary made by Mankato native (and Carleton alumnus), Jimmy Chin, about two ascents of the mountain by three Alpinists, Chin, Conrad Anker, the leader of the group, and Renan Ozturk.  The film is conventional, devoid of any thoughtful commentary on the folly of the enterprise, and fantastically picturesque -- we see dizzying escarpments, enormous fluted walls of snow with tiny figures clambering up them, great pinnacles of unstable rock traversed by men hanging over a four-thousand foot void.  The mountaineers sleep in something called a Portaledge, that is, a kind of tented hammock dangling off the cliff.  Since the best ice-climbing is in the dark, when the glaciers are frozen hard, the men drag themselves up huge ice fields by the light in their helmets -- they look like cave explorers in a vast impenetrable darkness.  The sacred mountain is repeatedly shown in high relief, its digitized image cast against skies full of blazing nebula and constellations, an eerie and unnatural, if powerful, special effect. 

The documentary has a three parts.  In the first, the team attacks the mountain in 2008 but, trapped for ten days by horrific storm, fail to reach the summit -- although it's only 300 feet above them, they are too debilitated by exhaustion to make the final push.  All of them men have a combination of frost bite and trench-foot -- their toes are literally decomposing and Chin reports that he had to spend six weeks in a wheel chair before he could walk again.  In the second part of the film, the adventurers go their separate ways, to catastrophic effect.  While filming some kind of commercial at Jackson Hole, Chin is caught in an avalanche that kills two other men -- he survives by sheer happenstance.  Ozturk is filming a similar commercial in the Tetons and makes a wrong turn on a ski-board, falling off a cliff and suffering horrendous injuries -- his neck is broken, his skull shattered so that his brain is exposed, and one of the arteries providing blood to his brain is severed.  Experts opine that Ozturk will never climb again, but he engages in fantastically aggressive physical rehabilitation -- it involves doing one-handed push-ups with forty-pound weights in his fist and dragging tractor tires chained to his waist around pole-barns at the elevation of Boulder, Colorado.  Eight months or so after Ozturk's almost fatal fall, he's back on Meru as part of Anker's second expedition, an endeavor that is, ultimately, successful -- although not without some close-calls and only after Ozturk seems to suffer a mini-stroke two days before reaching the summit.  

Meru is inspiring in its own mindless way and the cinematography is remarkable.  But you learn nothing much from the movie,  Obviously, this kind of extreme mountain-climbing is ultimately lethal.  The question is not whether you will die, but, rather, when.  There's no convincing explanation as to why these men will pursue this kind sport, an activity that is, essentially, suicidal.  "The elephant in the room", obvious to viewers but never discussed, is Conrad Anker's age -- the man looks like Lance Armstrong and he must be in his mid-forties.  (He lives in Bozeman and is married to the wife of a climbing partner who died during one of his expeditions.)  The question that occurred to me was whether Anker was too old for this kind of exertion -- and, indeed, in the interior shots in the Portaledge, Anker seems near comatose with exhaustion.  But the film doesn't address those issues -- there is no snappy dialogue at all.  At 20,000 feet, it's hard enough to just breathe let alone talk.  Commentary of the gee-whiz! variety is supplied by the gnarled Jon Krakauer.  I thought the movie was fairly entertaining, but pointless.  The three climbers don't exhibit much in the way of idiosyncrasies and they cooperate so closely in the ascent that we have no sense of any independent thinking in their approach to the mountain.  There is nothing conflicted or ambiguous about any of these men and the stance of the film toward them is overtly worshipful.