Ringside seat to view nature's brutal beauty

IT takes a special kind of madness to climb mountains because - apart from the inherent dangers posed by blizzards and avalanches - climbers face the constant threat of injury or worse from hypothermia, altitude sickness and simply falling off the mountain. None of this deters hardcore adventurers since the urge to achieve something extraordinary supplants everything else. Why do it? Because it's there, of course.

Everest, a disaster movie about an ill-fated 1996 expedition to conquer the highest peak in the world, goes some way towards explaining what drives people to climb mountains. Mostly, though, it shows the devastating power of nature.

The film, directed by Baltasar Kormakur and written by William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, is a straightforward, if harrowing, retelling of a well-chronicled story. Viewers are invited to draw their own conclusions about the tragedy that occurred.