New Netflix documentary takes viewers to the tops of the world’s highest peaks
by Joe Nolan
There are many sub-genres in the sports documentary category: boxing films, running films, films about specific athletic events, films about specific sports and sports media personalities. One of my favorite sub-genres of jock cinema is mountain climbing movies. Free Solo was one of my favorite films of 2018. It’s a quintessential mountain climbing movie that delivered a surplus of the kind of vertigo-inducing scenes that make these peak-seeking films so unique. And movies like Valley Uprising (2014) and Dirtbag: The Legend of Fred Beckley (2017) introduce viewers to the kinds of off-beat and over-the-top (pun intended) personalities that are drawn to the death-defying thrills of questing for ever-higher summits.
There are only 14 mountains in the world that rise over the 8000 meter mark. Climbers pass into a space known as the “death zone” as they trudge and pull and crawl their way passed it. Above 8000 meters frigid temperatures, slicing winds, crushing avalanches and suffocating oxygen deficits all conspire, insuring that only the strongest, most determined, luckiest or craziest humans ever see the world from these summits. And sometimes these mountains still kill these people, stealing back their glory before they can return to the safety of sea level. In the new Netflix mountain climbing documentary, 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible, Nepali mountaineer Nimsdai Purja attempts to summit all 14 mountains in only 7 months, breaking the previous world record for this feat: 7 years.
In addition to harrowing scenes rife with nail-biting tension, and extreme personalities, mountain climbing documentaries also promise breathtaking imagery, and 14 Peaks doesn’t disappoint when it comes to pretty pictures. There isn’t a formal cinematographer named on the film’s credits. Instead, Purja did much of the filming himself and his crew of Sherpas also helped to lens the gorgeous snow peaks as the team traveled around the world. A few professional cameramen captured scenes as the film was able to secure more funding, and a pair of vloggers who were inspired by Purja’s determination shot much of the first trip to the first base camp of the first climb. This hodgepodge approach to photographing these climbs yields intensely intimate scenes and gorgeous drone-captured footage shot from the sky at the top of the world. Director Torquil Jones and editor Ian Grech lash their original images together with thrilling – for fans of this genre/sport – historical footage and new interviews with climbing legends that help to tell the story of the past century of mountain climbing, putting Purja’s epic quest in context.
Purja was born into a desperately poor family in Nepal. Growing up facing a lack of opportunities, he joined the storied military forces of the Gurkha Reserve Unit – a special guard and elite shock-troop force in the Sultanate of Brunei. 14 Peaks includes harrowing footage of Purja jumping from a military plane only to have his parachute misfire. Purja calmly announces that he has to cut the chute away and then he’s free-falling again. He pulls the ripcord on his extra chute and it snaps open perfectly above his head. In another sequence he recalls how he fell off the roof of a building after being shot at by an enemy sniper. The bullet was aimed at Purja’s neck, but it hit the butt of his rifle. His gun saved his life, but the shock was still great enough to blast him a few stories down to the street below. Purja’s military experiences clearly prepared his mind and body for the challenges of his global mountaineering trek, but I wonder if it also contributed to his appetite for extremes. As he says during a sequence documenting his team climbing their sixth summit, “In the death zone, I come alive.”
14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible is now streaming on Netflix