Review: The Summit of the Gods Vibrantly Reveals Everest’s Topographical Mystique

As evidenced by gripping documentaries like Touching the Void and Meru, as well as action cheesefests like K2 and Vertical Limit, mountaineering is perfectly suited for the gigantic canvas of the movie screen. But alongside the vistas that they put on breathtaking display, all of these films ponder, some more implicitly than others, the same existential question: Why are so many willing to risk their lives for the pursuit of the peak?

This applies tenfold to the scaling of Mount Everest, a virtual suicide mission that still results in the deaths of multiple climbers each year (there’s already been four in 2021). Patrick Imbert’s animated The Summit of the Gods is the latest film to attempt an infiltration of this incredible mindset, and while it intermittently stuns in revealing Everest’s topographical mystique, its expedition into what makes climbers tick struggles to get off the ground.

Based on the award-winning manga by Taniguchi Jirô, The Summit of the Gods begins as a fanciful mountaineering detective story with roots in the calamitous real-life 1924 Everest expedition that ended with British climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappearing on the northeast ridge of the mountain. While Mallory’s body was eventually discovered (in May 1999), Irvine’s and the portable camera with which they used to document their journey never was, leading to heated debate over whether they actually reached Everest’s summit.

In the film’s present time of 1994, Japanese photojournalist Fukamachi (Damien Boisseau) believes that he spots Irvine’s sought-after camera in the hands of another climber, Habu Jôji (Éric Herson Macarel), while working in Kathmandu. But before Fukamachi can get closer, the mysterious Habu, who’s been living off the grid for years, vanishes into the night.

Back in Japan, Fukamachi throws himself into researching the life of the mercurial Habu, at one point considered the brightest new star on the climbing circuit, and The Summit of the Gods accordingly sidesteps into the past with him. Imbert, who worked as the animation director on Ernest & Celestine and April and the Extraordinary World, brings an often eye-popping visual flair to this faux-biopic setup, where we come to learn how Habu became an outcast in the mountaineering community due to his austere methodology, relentless practice rituals, and a propensity for going it alone. Yet despite the mesmeric look of Imbert’s film, the events of Habu’s life are shuttled through in rather pedestrian fashion.

Here, the intriguing mystery of Habu’s life and potential metaphysical connection to Mallory fades away in favor of the kind of overused melodrama seen in many outdoorsy adventure tales. At one point in Habu’s life story, a heavily foreshadowed climbing accident cribs from the same kind of heightened intensity as the oft-imitated (and parodied) opening of Renny Harlin’s Cliffhanger, complete with dramatic falling and screams of “Noooooooooo!” Insofar as Imbert is presumably determined to make a climbing flick that feels unlike any other, the expected thrills generated from this sequence are disappointingly familiar.

As The Summit of the Gods increasingly succumbs to convention, its scrutiny of Habu’s interiority becomes correspondingly rote, eventually landing on vague and hackneyed spiritual motivations, as when the man decisively states, “Climbing is the only thing that makes me feel alive.” Yet as pure visual spectacle, The Summit of the Gods still enthralls, particularly in the final stretch when Fukamachi locates Habu and then accompanies him on a fresh attempt to reach Everest’s peak. As the duo climbs higher, the vibrant animation reflects the progressively hazardous terrain and chaotic weather conditions of the mountains more intensely than the overworked special effects of so many big-budget, live-action extravaganzas.