The Summit of the Gods review: Netflix’s intense manga adaptation is a trip

When you begin to look into the facts, the distance between what people think of Mount Everest as and its reality is astounding. It’s easy to romanticize the trip as a statement about challenging human limitations and conquering nature. Step one: Hike to the top of the highest mountain on the planet “because it’s there.” Step two: Stand triumphantly at the summit, looking down on the entirety of the world. Step three: Feel the indomitability.

But there’s nothing romantic about the actual process, which typically involves paying huge sums of money and wading through reams of red tape in order to spend an average of two months on a grueling climb with a low chance of success. Because of the unpredictable weather, summits are only accessible for weeks or days every year. This means that many expeditions end up being cancelled. Even today, it’s surprisingly common for climbers to die on Everest.

French animated film that is lush and chilly. Summit of the Gods, based on Jirô Taniguchi’s manga adaptation of Baku Yumemakura’s 1998 novel, doesn’t try to sell the romantic view of Everest, or portray the dream of reaching the top as heroic or glamorous. Patrick Imbert, director, focuses only on the story and the determination that drove people to take risks. Not for an adrenaline-spinning thrill but rather for a long, difficult, lonely, exhausting journey. Imbert’s film, now streaming on Netflix, acknowledges that there’s a kind of nobility in single-mindedly pursuing a cause, regardless of the costs. He portrays this pursuit with somberness and thoughtfulness, but he doesn’t forget how much it is similar to madness.

The story’s structure is telling — much like Citizen Kane, it features a journalist trying to reconstruct a man’s life by talking to his former friends, peers, and partners, reconstructing the threads of his history in order to understand him better. But the journalist, Fukamachi Makoto (Damien Boisseau), isn’t trying to paint a portrait of a dead man, he’s trying to track down a living one. Fukamachi is a photographer for a magazine and takes pictures on Everest of the progress of a Japanese expedition. When they prepare poorly and run behind schedule, they’re forced to turn back early, leaving him without the photos he needed for his assignment.

Fukamachi returns to Kathmandu in order to complain to his editor. Fukamachi sees a man Fukamachi believes to be Habu Joji (Eric Herson Macarel), an once-famous climber that disappeared many years back. And he’s holding a camera Fukamachi believes might have belonged to George Mallory, an explorer who disappeared on Everest in 1924. The question of whether Mallory, along with Andrew Irvine, reached Everest’s summit 29 years ago remains a mystery. Fukamachi is hoping that the camera can provide the answers. Although the body of Mallory’s real-life counterpart was recovered in 1999, his camera never was.

When Fukamachi can’t track Habu down, he retraces the man’s steps, from his childhood to his days as the prickly outlier in a Japanese climbing club to his solo career, attempting startling and record-breaking feats in an attempt to make a name for himself and earn the acclaim and sponsorships that will let him take on greater trials. It’s clear that Habu was driven by both a powerful obsession with pushing the limits of what was possible for climbers, and by an equally powerful determination to walk his path alone, for reasons shaped by the experiences Fukamachi gradually uncovers.

There’s a powerful sense of melancholy to Summit of the GodsIt is somewhat like the sense of isolation and sadness in the French animated movie (and also on Netflix) but with a bit more depth. I Lost My Body. Only one of these movies has a severed hand crawling around Paris fighting urban wildlife, but both are about people who’ve become emotionally disconnected from those around them, and have found a reason to go on by doggedly chasing a difficult task. Both movies tap into the French sense of ennui. This is a feeling of boredom that results from finding all things uninteresting and mundane. I Lost My Body’s protagonist finds his escape in chasing a girl, while Habu finds his in chasing ever-more-difficult climbs, and the dream of fame that might go with them.

Fukamachi, however, finds Habu’s in following him. He’s just as obsessive as Habu, and just as prone to leaving other people behind as he doggedly pursues his fixation. It’s clear that both men are remarkably alike, even if their goals differ. Both of them clearly see the barriers in front of them, and can’t find it within themselves to turn away from the chase and live normal lives, no matter how unsatisfying each new achievement becomes in turn.

Image by Netflix

The movie’s methodical pace and quiet, internal air take some patience, but the climbing sections are dizzying and emotional, with high stakes and realism-driven action. Imbert ensures that the viewer feels every mistake, every loose foothold and crumbling foothold as well as every muscle strain and fraying rope. When climbers do face Everest, viewers who’ve seen photos of the ice walls and base camps may be surprised at the level of specificity in this film, and how hard Imbert works for you-are-there veracity. He doesn’t seem to be out to demythologize Everest, but he never makes it look easy or stylized, either. For most of us, this intimate, hands-on look at the mechanics of mountaineering is the closest we’re likely to get to the highest point on the planet.

That sense of going along on the climbers’ journey is the primary attraction of Summit of the GodsIt keeps all other delights minimal and measured. Character animations are simple. Backgrounds often shoot for simplified photorealism that is only slightly stylized. There’s none of the energy or visual play that animation does so well. It isn’t quite rotoscoping, but there’s a sense of weighty reality that most animated films lack.

But where the film lacks speed or a sense of play, it instead brings in a form of awe, both at the scale of Habu’s endeavors, and at the clear danger he’s braving on his quest to reach the top of his field and the top of the world. Although he does win, there are also losses and costs. The sense that there’s always going to be another mountain ahead layers a heavy sense of inevitability over the story. Summit of the Gods isn’t a joyous film, and it isn’t a dreamy one. It is a very insightful meditation about the challenges of climbing Mount Everest and why so many people continue to take up this challenge.

Summit of the GodsThis film is only available in theaters and can be streamed on Netflix right now.