Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

paul-85984 I'd like to add to the chorus of voices complaining about The Summit, a collection of poignant interviews, skillfully staged re-creations of actual events, and documentary photographs and film footage, all jumbled together into an almost incomprehensible mess. It's not as if this documentary about the tragic events on K2 in the summer of 2008 is poorly edited, it's more like it wasn't edited at all. Imagine watching a story that has been chopped into pieces, thrown into a blender, and then reassembled by someone suffering from the same hypoxic delirium that contributed to the deaths of some of the climbers. One is left with the feeling of having watched an interesting and compelling story that should have been told in a far more concise and straightforward manner. Unfortunate, too, because it's a heck of a story.

phillip_harben Interesting documentary, but as others have written, The Summit suffers from a disjointed narrative which impacts it negatively. Largely focusing on the events of two days in 2008, which saw 11 climbers die, it is bizarrely interspersed with K2's first summit attempt back in the fifties. I do not know why Walter Bonatti's tale was woven into this. It had no bearing on the events in 2008 and should have been cut.Also, the narrative jumps between 2008 and an aborted attempt in 2006, but as both attempts feature the same two people in the same geographical area, it is confusing. Also, the film mixes reconstruction with actual footage which adds more confusion.Whoever edited this deserves shooting, as does director Nick Ryan for his blatant bias toward the fellow Irishman Ger McDonnell, who lost his life on K2. Trying to shoehorn a story of heroism into this mess of a film is incongruous at best. If he wanted to tell the story of Ger, he should have set that stall out to begin with, then weave the other narrative around it. Instead, we get some heavy- handed clunkiness about his (possible) heroism, based on supposition and hardly a shred of evidence. Really? The Koreans were further down the mountain than they were? Ger cut their tangled ropes and helped them down? Based on no evidence at all. This is a dog's breakfast of a documentary, lacking in coherent narrative and some bad directorial decisions. Why the high score, then? Despite all of the above, it was gripping in parts, and had some utterly breathtaking cinematography. It also gave the viewer an insight into the harsh, unforgiving "death zone" of K2.

jdesando "He discovers things about his own body and mind that he had almost forgotten in the day-to-day, year-to-year routine of living." James Ramsey Ullman, High Conquest.I don't know about you, but if I were approaching the "death zone" while mountain climbing, I'd turn back. However, you can bet the heroes of the documentary, The Summit, hiking the world's second biggest and most difficult mountain (it defeats 1 out of every 4 climbers), K2, had no such thoughts. The Summit won the Sundance World Cinema documentary award this year.More interesting than the physical exploits is the rationale for doing such a dangerous sport in the first place. Yet, such psychoanalyzing is not a matter for The Summit, a thrilling doc long on the difficult climb and more difficult decisions while fates are decided in sometimes inscrutable and random ways. It's short on the motivation, which pretty much is accepted these days as, "because it's there." Eleven climbers of 25 lost their lives that day in 2008 without an adequate explanation for any of the deaths. However this thesis is proved once more: Most lives in climbing are lost on the descent. The film has a fragmented, multiple-points-of-view (think of a climbing Rashomon) approach that cuts among the several players and history while featuring a couple of the more charismatic climbers, especially Ger McDonnell, whose death is the most difficult to understand even as he's touted for his alleged attempt to save 3 Korean climbers. This discursive storytelling can be confusing while it saps the thrust of the inherently intriguing story. The many re-enactments drain the film of its immediate "what-the" doc impact. The film retains some of the awe we all feel when in the presence of such a manifestation of Nature's power: "You do not laugh when you look at the mountains, or when you look at the sea." Lafcadio Hearn

mmguica From what I understood, this documentary set out to answer a difficult moral dilemma: should a climber endanger his own life in order to save others'? I think it did a beautiful job at giving a rather complete picture of people's different perspectives, attitudes, projected against the outcome. It is probably one of the best documentaries that I have seen, in the sense that it manages to capture the gist of this issue.On a more personal note, I really liked the comment that the widow of one of the perished climbers makes towards the end of the movie. It raises an interesting question "of judgment" for the people that are outside the climbing world.