The Summit (2012)

Film: The Summit (2012)
Director: Nick Ryan
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

What a weird movie.  That was the comment I texted about twenty minutes into watching The Summit, the recent documentary about the 2008 disaster on K2 which killed eleven people, making it the deadliest day in mountaineering history.  The film won an Editing prize out of Sundance and combined two of my favorite things in the trailers (mountaineering and mysteries), so I was quite certain that I would enjoy it, but man was that a mistake.  The Summit is proof that much like how you can take any story and make it fascinating with the right combination of writing, directing, and editing, you can also make any story boring and pointless when that combination is wasted.

The film's biggest mistake, in my opinion, was the weird juxtaposition between re-staging events and actual footage on top of the mountain.  It took me about fifteen minutes to realize that the film was filled with actors re-creating this scene, as initially I was flabbergasted that, short of planning the deaths himself, a documentary filmmaker could achieve such incredible footage as someone falling fifty feet down a mountain to their death or actually coming across a still living injured human being.  Once I realized that Nick Ryan wasn't a Lou Bloom-style filmmaker, the movie felt incredibly cheesy.  Increasingly these re-stagings actually look more and more fake, like when you had to watch those videos in Sunday School with the crumby production values showing Moses being found on a riverbank.  They also took me insanely outside of the actual documentary, as it was near impossible to realize if something was a staging or not, or even if all of the talking heads were actually who they said they were, since Ryan never once acknowledges what is real and what is fake, either with voiceover or with some sort of title card.

As a result the film is a weird meta-experiment in what one believes to be real, but it's not trying for that and so the entire movie fails miserably.  Honestly, I haven't had such a bizarre film-watching experience in eons.  The fact that the film won an editing award, when it is arguably the worst example of editing I've seen in a movie (I plan on referencing it as an example of bad editing, quite frankly, going forward) is even more shocking.  The movie not only cannot handle the blurring of lines, but it keeps retelling the story over and over and over again, without enough resolution in the end, since in the end we don't uncover the mystery.  We have people who are constantly backtracking their opinions, perhaps aware they are being filmed, but that doesn't make for a compelling narrative which this style of action-documentary is going for in the first place.  When we get to the final showdown, wondering if the principle focus of the film (an Irish mountaineer named Ger) was a hero, a madman, or perhaps even a murder victim (they hint around it, but I'm just saying that it seems like the documentary crew is going there even if they can't dare say it out-loud), we learn absolutely nothing except that there may have been discrepancies in the story, which we already knew.  As a result we occasionally get sweeping vistas of K2, but that's about all this movie is good for, in my opinion.

Did anyone else see this bizarre documentary?  My guess is no (it made zilch at the Box Office, though that's usually true of Art House documentaries that don't come with Oscars), but if you did I would love some discussion.  If you didn't, can you give an example of a film that had a subject you loved that you ended up hating because of the filmmaker's style?  Share it in the comments!