“Mountains are places of terrible joys and dreadful splendors” – Willem Defoe

Last night, I went to see the movie “Mountain” by Sherpa Cinemas and Camp 4 Collective at the Clay Theater in San Francisco, CA.

The movie was largely stunning mountain imagery combined with symphony music and Willem Defoe explaining that mountains don’t care about you.

The movie focuses on footage from Alaska and the Himalaya and recycles a decent amount of footage from previous movies.

The movies starts showing how rugged mountains are, then shows how the ski industry is pumping regular people into the mountains enmasse, then ends saying mountains are wild and that we need their wildness.

To be honest, I wanted this movie to inspire me.  It didn’t really do that…

The movie was more of a downer with the message of:  mountains are big and deadly and they don’t care about you.

PROS:

• Cool ski/snowboard segment.
• Amazing footage of 2 climbers up high in Alaska.
• Some crazy footage of Alex Honnold free soloing some insane lines.
• Great music -Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto combined with insane aerial footage of high mountains was unique.

CONS:

• Lots of recycled footage from “All. I. Can.”, MSP ski movies, and other mountain movies.
• Much of ski/snowboard footage was old – some of it from early 2000s.
• Slow.
• Dark.
• A bit of a downer.

OVERALL:

• The bottomline is that I wouldn’t recommend this to my buddies to go see.
• To be honest, if felt like a bit of a downer to me…
• It was kind of a downer, to be honest.
• The movie made it appear that ski resorts are bad.
• The coolest part of the movie is aerial footage of  2 climbers climbing a high ridgeline in Alaska.