Touching The Void (2003)

I don't know why I waited to watch Touching The Void. I guess I felt there was no sense of urgency to watch it; maybe I felt like I knew how it would play and that it would be predictable thereby rendering it unnecessary. But when I noticed it was coming on tv, i was keen to watch- maybe out of residual bonhomie from 127 Hours - ideal double-bill partners.
Not that they're especially similar the main difference that tragic accident in that movie means the guy is completely stuck- in this movie, the unfortunate climber has to keep moving or he will DIE. The other main difference is that this movie is told in interview and narration by the real people involved, with actors reconstructing the events.
Which brings me to one of my original preconceptions - if these guys are being interviewed, then by proxy- we know they've survived and if we know that where does the dramatic tension come from? Well to highlight my naivety, as with 127 Hours, The question becomes not did they survive but how did they escape their desperate situation? And in the broad sense, what does it feel like to be in that situation and an extra dimension not in 127 Hours, what is it like leave your best friend to save yourself?
It's at these points where Touching The Void shines with Simon Yates and Joe Simpson's intense honesty about their thought processes in these life-or-death situations like Simon admitting to thinking about coming up with a different story to explain what happened to Joe to explain why he didn't make it back so he wouldn't have to say, he cut his rope loose to save himself. It's moments like this that make the drama all the more accessible because... In that situation, you know in your heart-of-hearts, you'd be thinking the exact same thoughts and there's an unspoken agreement there between them because Joe would have done the exact same thing and says as much. But then besides the gallows-mindset, when Joe had to pull himself together to stay alive; he develops this fully understandable, petty system to make himself work harder and improve his time descending the mountain, in the way, any of us would in the way we work at work everyday.
It's an admirable debut from Kevin MacDonald and certainly better than recent effort, The Eagle. MacDonald was a producer on Senna and he's certainly better with the documentary/true story stuff like Last King of Scotland . I'm not writing the guy off just yet but Kev- Stay in the yard of the last century, yeah?

I watched Touching The Void (2003) on FilmFour.
My 2011 in Movies will return with CopOut (2010)...