‘Tenzing’ Review: A Remarkable Adventure That Puts the Audience Right Up on Mount Everest, Along with the First Two Men — One a Sherpa, Overlooked by History — to Scale It
The movies are having a mountain-climbing moment. More than a moment, really — it’s been building since 2018, the year that saw the release of not one but two jaw-dropping, vertigo-inducing, heart-in-the-throat documentaries, “Free Solo” and “The Dawn Wall,” that took you right up to the places that climbers crave and that most of us wouldn’t dare to go near. But as these films demonstrate, we might well dream of it. The new mountaineering movies are delirious vicarious cinema, employing technological means and a filmmaking bravado that comes with them that would have been unimaginable three or four decades ago. Movies like “14 Peaks” and “The Alpinist” — or “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” the great documentary about rooftoppers — chart the impossible, and the very fact that the films exist can seem part of the impossible. That’s an element of their scary exhilaration.
“Tenzing” fits into the genre, though in a far more traditional way.
