The Summit

Can somebody enlighten me about the directors ideas to cut the material as he did? 30 min in we are in newspaper clippings after the 'accident'/incident and feelings of friends of mountaineers. 5 min later we rewind to 3 months before.

the attempt to introduce the characters and tell the story seemed a bit too much of an endeavour.

i am really sad about this... very unsatisfying, this could have been a stellar piece of documentary.

Confusing and untrue at times. I had to read about what actually happened to find out the facts after 2 hours of poorly put together interviews. Also the Serbian climber was quite selfless and died because he unclipped to let other people pass him, not to pass Skog. I don't know why they would make such a strange mistake on this detail, but it's either deliberate lying to make the story better or poor research.

At 8 a.m. climbers were finally advancing through the Bottleneck. Dren Mandić, from the Serbian team, decided to attend to his oxygen system and so unclipped from the rope to let other climbers pass. Mandić lost his balance and fell, bumping into Cecilie Skog of the Norwegian team. She was still clipped to the rope and was only knocked over. Mandić fell over 100 m down the bottleneck.

This is a story about tragedy caused by complete and utter confusion. From simple mistakes at the beginning of the attempt everything turned into chaos that cost many lives.

So, given that confusion in the subject matter, it would be difficult to remove confusion from the documentary. Sadly, the creators seem to have actually gone out of their way to introduce more confusion. Out of sequence histories, introducing another (related) story, and not attempting to tie everything together.

I'm glad that I watched this movie, I just would have liked it to be better put together.

I'd like to add to the chorus of voices complaining about The Summit, a collection of poignant interviews, skillfully staged re-creations of actual events, and documentary photographs and film footage, all jumbled together into an almost incomprehensible mess. It's not as if this documentary about the tragic events on K2 in the summer of 2008 is poorly edited, it's more like it wasn't edited at all. Imagine watching a story that has been chopped into pieces, thrown into a blender, and then reassembled by someone suffering from the same hypoxic delirium that contributed to the deaths of some of the climbers. One is left with the feeling of having watched an interesting and compelling story that should have been told in a far more concise and straightforward manner. Unfortunate, too, because it's a heck of a story.

The story and the history is very interesting. The plot is chaotic. The interviews are random and there is no real reconstruction at the end. I made a better movie when I was 16 years old. Wasted potential.