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Hollywood has always had a problem with making movies about mountaineering. The standard staples of stunts, action, romance and characterisations are difficult to maintain with a mountaineering plot where the general aim in an expedition is to achieve the goal with the minimum of drama and personal conflict. Also the subtleties of the action be it crossing intricately crevassed glaciers, smearing up delicate protectionless slabs or front pointing up ice falls are difficult to represent cinematically and would be lost on most of the audience anyway. This probably explains the paucity of climbing movies and where they do exist the climbing is normally a sub plot to some greater skullduggery (e.g. Cliffhanger, The Eiger Sanction) or else the cinematic license taken is so extreme as to make the climbing scenes utterly ridiculous (Vertical Limit). Also the ease with which you can weave falling bodies and cut ropes into the plot means that it is frequently overused and hence loses its effect after a while. The best approach seems to have been the Cliffhanger method which is essentially a big name action movie using the paraphernalia of climbing to show Sly engaging in a lot of unlikely stunts. All the climbing scenes are utterly ridiculous (apart from Wolfgang Gullich soloing at the beginning) but as an action movie it is great fun.

However we now see the emergence of Touching the Void. This has been done in documentary style with the recreation of the climb of Siula Grande interspersed with the talking heads of Joe Simpson and Simon Yates.

Interestingly Simpson and Yates are not identified when they first appear and it is left to the story to identify them to the uninitiated. The documentary maker has his task much simplified over the film maker in that his plot is fixed in history. In this case the sheer dramatic quality of the story is such that it needs only a light touch to bring the horrors of Simpson’s experience to life. The re-enactment of the climb is beautifully filmed and the commentary by Simpson and Yates manages to fill in the technicalities to a non climbing audience in an unobtrusive manner. As most of the audience would be familiar with the essentials of the story (and fully assured of a happy ending as both of the protagonists are still around) the key events of leg breaking and rope cutting are handled in matter of fact manner. This ensures that the inevitability and logical necessity of cutting the rope are recognised by the audience rather than using a more flamboyant approach which would have served to give the audience a cheap shock. The former approach is far more effective as the moral decision by Yates is shared by the audience and further emphasised by the real torment still seen on Yates’s face. The long drawn out self rescue by Simpson with a broken leg is a grim study in fortitude and determination.

Overall it is a marvelously entertaining film that sums up the spirit of climbing far better than any other mainstream production and can be thoroughly recommended to all.