Viewers will find them nearly as breathtaking if they had climbed to the top gasping in the high altitude. Those of us who will never make it to the top of one of these peaks will get an unprecedented opportunity to see what the top of the world looks like with pristine images of stunning clarity and grandeur captured by Purja himself. In one scene we see a very impressed high altitude specialist comment on his physical condition. He goes on a 20 km run with a 75-pound pack every morning and goes to the gym after work until 11. Purja, a member of the Nepali Gurkha special forces, is the youngest son of a loving family and was always intensely competitive. Later, another fallen climber they come across will not be so lucky. At 6 AM they get him to base camp where he is picked up by a helicopter. “I was not going to do that on the mountain.” Purja and his team have to stay awake all night with the critically ill climber. “I have never left anyone behind,” Purja says about his time in the military. “You surmounted one of the most dangerous summits in the world and now you’re going to go back up there?” another climber asks, admitting that he was hoping the stranded climber had died so they would not have to find a way to get him to a hospital. They discover one on their descent from their first peak and go back to help him. Over the course of the film, we see his determination but also his heroic generosity of spirit, helping others who had given up to achieve the summits and stopping, at the risk of missing his deadline, to help climbers suffering from exposure or altitude sickness. He makes a point of introducing us to each member of the team at the beginning of the film, calling them his brothers and telling us about each one’s special skill. It will burnish the resumes of his team and provide more opportunities. “So, I decided to name it Project: Possible.” He is determined to do it to give Nepali climbers the credit they are due, and, he notes, to pay them more than they would get from Western climbers. “I was told that my project was impossible,” Purja tells us. One of the mountains normally takes four days to summit. And Purja almost always climbs without additional oxygen, to altitudes with just a third of the oxygen we are used to breathing. Aside from the almost unthinkable challenge each mountain poses, the physical, emotional, and financial problems of doing them in such a short time and the unpredictability of the weather, there are the geopolitical/diplomatic challenges, with mountains in Nepal, Pakistan, and Tibet/China. Usually, one of this documentary’s experts tells us, any of these mountains is a two-month project. Purja decided he would do it in seven months. The first was Reinhold Messner, and it took him 16 years to do them all. There is a reason that we use mountain metaphors to speak of tasks that are beyond the realm of the achievable, describing them as “insurmountable.” Only a handful of people have climbed all 14 of the 8,000-meter mountains.
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