Vertical Limit

Vertical Limit ★
This is a movie about the climbing of K2 by a young brash group of climbers, accompanied by a film crew from National Geographic. The main characters are a brother and sister whose father and other family members perished in a family rock climb, which demanded that one of the family members cut the rope to save their life, but lead to the death of the other members of the family. All in all, the only value to this film was nice cinemaphotography. Its deficits are plentiful. There are multiple serious climbing inaccuracies, including a) people don’t climb 5-6 people per rope on rock b) people don’t have major amounts of flesh exposed with light garments high on K2 c) people don’t breath easily for long periods of time in the death zone, d) steroids are not the magic fix for HAPE, e) nobody survives for more than an hour deep in a crevasse, as it’s just too cold, etc., etc. The film was produced mostly in New Zealand, which was also quite easy to detect. The plot of the story was quite crazy. Subplots, such as the necessity of carrying large quantities of nitroglycerine to the top of K2 in order to rescue their comrades was stupid. The historic climbing ethic was that you go down with your party, and not that you cut yourself loose in order to kill your rope members and save your own skin. I am not sure why such a quality climber like Ed Viesturs would allow himself to have multiple cameos in the film with so many gross inadequacies. This film is not worth watching.