‘The Last First: Winter K2’ Review: Amir Bar-Lev Documentary Looks At Mountaineering’s Commercial Boom Through A Tragic 2021 Expedition

Mountaineering has an industrial, commercial side, and it shows up in more than one way in The Last First: Winter K2. There is the boom in the business of the sport itself, driven by a mass influx of tourists and influencers who want to climb dangerous peaks so they can post their progress and conquests on social media. There are the people who have always climbed, who now attract far more attention from sponsors. And there is the documentary that films them all, one of many, part of a parallel industry that The Last First belongs to as well.

The film, from the director of Long Strange Trip, centers on events from 2021, when mountaineering began to come back to life in Nepal and Pakistan, home to the tallest peaks on earth, Everest included, as the pandemic wound down. But the protagonists had a different target in mind: K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. That «savage mountain» sits in Pakistan (most of the peaks above 8,000 meters are in Nepal), and nobody had ever reached its summit, at more than 8,600 meters, in winter. The detail matters, because the brutal cold doubles the difficulty.

The man who set out to do it was the Icelandic climber John Snorri, and we watch him say goodbye to his family (still in face masks) before leaving for the legendary mountain. There, together with two Pakistani experts, father and son Ali and Sajid Sadpara, he built a substantial base camp and began his approaches. The surprise came a few weeks later, when a team of Nepalese climbers led by the charismatic (and, according to the film, controversial) Nims Purja showed up. Purja arrived with the clear goal of taking the record and bringing it home to Nepal, a country with a deep mountaineering tradition (it’s where «sherpas,» the guides, come from) but few records to call its own.

That rivalry between experts, Bar-Lev’s documentary insists, was not the real problem. Things got worse when a company called Seven Summits, which sells high-altitude experiences to anyone willing to pay, began offering a «Winter K2» package as well, and some fifty more people arrived and settled into the same base camp with a similar goal. A few were professional climbers, yes, but many were amateurs, curiosity seekers and, above all, influencers whose lives revolve around showing off «photogenic» experiences on their feeds. The combination (too many people, punishing weather, inexperience, extreme competitiveness) ended in tragedy.

Bar-Lev narrates events at the mountain from the very start. The film never makes clear at what point its own cameras merged with the others trailing the various groups, which is unsurprising given the commercial logic of modern climbing, where no team goes up without a cameraman to document and glamorize its feats. Still, The Last First covers nearly everything that happens: the early calm, the first signs of tension, the cutthroat competition, the particular problems of winter climbing and the tragic episodes, many of which, the film claims, could have been avoided had the adventure not been so heavily commercialized.

This is one more case of «do as I say, not as I do,» because the film is undeniably part of the very commercialization it condemns. It seems to look on from the outside without realizing it is a participant in the aesthetically false promotion of high-altitude experiences. Much of its criticism is valid, aimed at what happens when novices and the merely curious are seduced by advertising campaigns that sell as an «experience» what is ultimately an extreme sport for experts. But it is just as undeniable that documentaries like this one also package as a blend of drama and beauty something that is, in reality, extremely dangerous.

Even so, and perhaps as a kind of mea culpa, the film moves from the visually stunning, gorgeous opening stretch to a portrait of how harsh the experience is on the ground: deadly cold, barely any room to sleep, practical problems of every kind, freezing wind and brutal avalanches. All of it shows that the experience is far less charming than it looks in photos and videos posted to social media. If Instagram always makes the world look prettier than it is, the gap between the virtual and the real is even wider in high-mountain climbing. What looks beautiful, romantic and even poetic on a phone screen can be a matter of life and death on the spot.