Review: EVEREST: THE FIRST ASCENT, Eclipso London

Going to Camden to get high was a teenage rite of passage a generation ago. Now, thanks to Eclipso’s latest VR expedition, kids can chase a rather different kind of high, with or without their parents in tow. Fresh from competition at the Venice International Film Festival, Everest: The First Ascent has pitched camp in the French company’s Camden basement, bringing a handful of incremental upgrades on its predecessors.

For those who don’t count encyclopedias as bedtime reading, a quick refresher. In 1924, George Mallory (the man who gave the world “Because it’s there” when a New York reporter asked why he would risk life and limb on the Himalayan giant) and his young climbing partner Sandy Irvine may have got there first. We will never know. Both died on the mountain, leaving clues but no proof. When Mallory’s body turned up in 1999, the photograph of his wife Ruth that he had promised to leave on the summit was missing from his pockets, as was the camera that might have settled the matter.

Scroll on to 1953, when British Army colonel John Hunt led a fresh expedition of Sherpas and international climbers. After his first summit pair turned back barely 100 metres from the top, Hunt sent up Tenzing Norgay and the New Zealander Edmund Hillary, who reached it on 29 May. The news was relayed home by Times correspondent James (later Jan) Morris and landed on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

Previous Eclipso shows have handed us a minor fictional companion for the journey (Colosseum’s eager youngster Caius being the latest). Here, directors Jean Dellac and Benjamin Auriche have sensibly put Tenzing at the centre of the story, and a voice cast led by Thomas Espinera gives him warmth as well as grit. We first meet him by a campfire, then follow him into Kathmandu on foot alongside a herd of cattle while Hillary arrives by train through terraced rice fields (the class system, it seems, travels well). 

Later we sit among horn-blowing monks at Tengboche Monastery as Tenzing prays for safe passage and take refuge with tea and meals brewed by the expedition’s Sherpas in the camps above. Along the way his advice falls on deaf Western ears, he saves Hillary from plunging into a crevasse, and even this hardened mountaineer can be seen to flag on the last approach. Letting a Sherpa narrate what history still often labels a “British expedition” is a quiet corrective to decades of the “Hillary-and-his-guide” shorthand, and it is the cleverest decision in the piece.

With barely half an hour to tell their tale, Dellac and Auriche waste no time, but never forget to let us gawp. Standing on the roof of the world with the Himalayas laid out for hundreds of miles in every direction is a proper jaw-dropper, even if it can’t quite match the Overview Effect conjured by Space Explorers, the venue’s ISS show. Then come the vertigo set pieces: going full Lara Croft across ladder bridges strung over crevasses deep enough to lose a Routemaster in. In the final stretch, visual effects mimic how oxygen starvation narrowed the vision of Tenzing and Hillary in the seconds before they got there. Smaller touches pay off too. Icicles hanging over the path can be snapped off as we pass, tapers can be picked up and used to light candles, a virtual wristwatch tells you the date and altitude, and objects can be passed between members of your group.

That pursuit of veracity comes at a price. The routes up the mountain are often rendered as narrow single-file corridors, so collisions with fellow climbers happen more than occasionally – something I rarely encountered in Titanic: Echoes from the Past, Colosseum: The Legendary Arena or Space Explorers. Historically apt, perhaps (the 1953 team spent much of the climb roped together), but rather less romantic when the body you’ve just walked into belongs to a stranger.

The sound design by Blanktone and Native Primes is enough to send a chill up the neck without any help from the air conditioning. The new headsets (Pico 4 Ultras fitted with a BoboVR headstrap) sit snugly over glasses, and the upgrade shows. The picture now respects distance the way the eye does: squiggles on a far wall or a handheld itinerary resolve into legible words as you lean in, a trick the older kit never quite managed.

As a piece of storytelling, then, this is no giant leap on from Colosseum or Titanic, sharper pixels notwithstanding. What it offers instead is the view, a more meditative pace than the sword-and-sandal bustle next door, and the rare thrill of being dropped inside one of the great human adventures of the last century, with the man who did the hard yards as your guide.

Camden has sold plenty of highs over the years. This is the first to come with 8,849 metres of altitude, a Sherpa for company and no comedown, just the short climb back up the stairs to the High Street.

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