North Face - Directed by Philipp Stolzl - Germany - 2009
Opening at Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave, Friday February 5th

A lot of trouble was clearly taken to get this movie shot. The occasional footage of actors, playing mountaineers, attempting to scale Germany's famous Eiger North Face just before the Berlin Olympics of 1936, is impressive. It's expansive, it's breathtaking, it's perilous, it focuses the movie into what is essentially and rightfully an adventure/survival story. That footage comprises the best parts of this film: professional climbers climbing, running into dangerous passes, nearly losing their footing,  helping their comrades up or down belaying ropes, etc.

Frustratingly, up to its final third North Face is too concerned with exposition and some really standard character conflicts to let loose the climbing scenes and craggy-peaks footage. Since it's relatively easy  to drum up excitement by putting hard-bitten professional types in harm's way, and considerably tougher to build realistic people  out of dialogue and scenes, it should have been a quick decision for a filmmaker as reliant on cliche as Philipp Stolzl to just put the majority of the emphasis on the action and the mountain, a la Cliffhanger.

The first two-thirds of North Face are concerned with trying to humanize two German mountaineers (Benno Furmann, of last year's solid, German Jerichow, and Florian Lukas) mainly by having a lost-love from their childhoods re-enter their lives as a newspaper reporter sent to cover their climb. The melodrama that's blindingly signaled by characters like lost-childhood-loves and hungry-young-reporters  is somewhat underplayed, mainly by the actors, so that most of the exposition has a slow, faded, period feel. None of which is matched by the jangling-booming  score or the hardly-curved plot twists. North  Face works well up high and in danger, but it's nearly always lost on the ground, where it insists on spending its time. If you're into mountain climbing - or death sports in general - see this at Cinema 21, then go rent Touching the Void, a very good documentary that spends all its time on the rocks.