Cerro Torre: A Snowball's Chance in Hell (2013)

To me, this movie is perfection.

the audience applauded

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

For all the magnificence of Patagonia, the finished product is all-over-the-place, with poor editing and pacing, and a penchant for being unnecessarily dramatic to the point of being eye-rolling.It's already a bad sign early on with the film's excessive use of tedious CG credits, and its odd editing style continues throughout, intercutting talking heads, sporadic narration, dramatised newspaper headlines and likely-scripted scenes in a clumsy manner. The only saving grace here is the simply spectacular scenery, which should really have been left to speak for itself without all the fluff.Whether or not you're interested in mountaineering, this is one to steer clear of. I can think of any number of similar films to see instead of this, each which has been put together in a far more competent and impactful manner - Meru, Touching The Void, The Wildest Dream, Everest: Beyond The Limit, The Summit etc. (To address another review, YES, the movie does say where Cerro Torre and Patagonia is - it's literally in the first few minutes!)

Climbing, especially at altitude, is a controversial sport. How much risk can you take? What style and equipment are fair to use? Should one trust the experts and community, or only himself?Cerro Torre is an excellent example of this controversy - first with Maestri's disputed ascent, then with his undisputed but condemned one, then with Kennedy & Kruk cleansing the mountain. "Cerro Torre" captures all of this and adds a story of David Lama, a Nepalese wonder boy obsessed with free climbing the peak.Some interest in climbing is probably required to fully enjoy this movie. If you don't understand the delicate difference between free & aid climbing, or don't know where Patagonia is and why climbing there is special, then you might not enjoy it as deeply as more informed viewers. However the amazing scenery, thrilling climbing sequences and conflicts between the climbers are there for everyone.Extra kudos to the film crew for getting to the summit themselves!Highly recommended.

This film tried to lure people into theatres by saying that it is not just another documentary on climbing. Sadly, this proves a lie as that is exactly what it is. Another lie is the title which states roughly translated from German "not a chance at all". Still they manage to make it to the top. And if that wasn't bad enough, one of the team has to strip naked as they actually succeeded. Embarrassment galore. Actually I would even say that they were correct by saying that this is not just another climbing documentary. In fact, it is much worse than the other ones out there.The action is exalted and the protagonists are arrogant dislikable climbers, who keep whining about the way they are perceived in public. The only thing this film is even worth watching for remotely are the beautiful landscapes of Patagonia. Another amateur aspect is that they never exactly said where Patagonia actually is and I don't think that it is so famous that you could immediately make the connection that Patagonia is in Chile as well as Argentina.We find out about one member's transformation from a wall climber into a mountain climber and this is accompanied by lots of talk about how cool they are and how manly they must be to dare climb such places. Narcicissm everywhere. Some scenes were very obviously staged with previously written dialog, such as the one where they wake up the main protagonist.This film is director Thomas Dirnhofer's first work and I'm not sure if I want to watch any future projects after the massive disappointment this turned out to be. It's really only worth a watch for climbers or maybe especially these are the ones that should not watch this documentary at all. I'm not sure. They may hate it even more than I did. Anyway, I am not really interested into climbing movies, but I am interested in films that can makes me interested into climbing movies. This was the exact opposite. Not recommended.

While delivering everything you'd expect from a contemporary climbing movie - vivid first-person-pov, breathtaking vista, vertigo-inducing shots ... - this production delves deeper which makes for a better film. The difference came only with the problems the production ran into - while originally planned as a simple climbing flick, to be finished in a few weeks, in the end they had gone to Patagonia 3 times, had filmed 2 summit climbs and many more tries, had to weather a veritable shitstorm from large parts of the climbers community - and they used all this material to shed some light on the background, the philosophy, the frustrations of expedition climbing and so on. So this became a much richer and interesting project, even if the budget must have exploded. And to top that, they also put in a historical flashback, some interviews or contributions (Reinhold Messner and Jim Bridwell amongst others) and, last but not least, portraits of the camera team and their struggles to catch David Lama's final climb (which would be worth a documentation of its own).Overall, recommended for everyone with even a slight interest in mountaineering or climbing, and much more interesting than a simple sports movie (as planned) would be.