Well that's put me well and truly off the Eiger Nordwand, not that I was really gagging to get on it anyway. All seemed like the usual intercut climbing sequences / interviews with old climbers etc, but somehow not very menacing till the point where the whole thing disintegrated into disaster when the two climbers fell from the top of the second icefield (I think).
Longstanding site users might recall Joe Simpson's article in the aftermath of the episode where he castigated the media over their reporting of the episode and it was pretty clear that the documentary makers handled the accident in a sensitive way - despite it being on film, it wasn't actually shown, though we saw the reaction of the local mountain rescue team to their viewing of the film.
See the original Joe Simpson article for OUTDOORSmagic. Joe was on the mountain at the time of the accident and featured, coincidentally, in the documentary.
There were too many half-baked and under-researched themes in this programme for it to say anything worthwhile, and too little climbing to redeem it. And the little climbing they elected to show totally failed to demonstrate the difficulty and the sheer length of the route.
One of its worst and continual errors was to confuse German/Austrian culture with Nazi culture, falsely suggesting that the Nazis practically invented mountaineering, when all they in fact did was exploit its popularity. And is encouraging mountaineers to risk death for national glory and propaganda purposes any worse than doing it to entertain TV viewers anyway ?
A lot of time was wasted in a reconstruction of how a journalist found oout about Harrer's Nazi past. What wasn't clarified was that this discovery was made several years ago, instead implying that the programme-makers had unturned something new. Typical of the subtle distortions of the truth they worked in throughout, and time which would have been much better spent in extending the climbing sequences.
I watched this expecting to see a good climbing documentary, and instead got a shabby history programme. Very disappointing.
I'd pretty much agree with that. It didn't seem to know whether it wanted to be a climbing film, a historical documentary or a blend of the two, so ended up being none of them. The only thing that stood out was the accident, which said more about the wall than anything the film managed.
That "reaction" bit was all I saw, I must say, it would have been nice to have seen if there was any outside influence on them falling (e.g. a rock hitting one), not too graphic (i'm not a sadist), but a little more like a properly informative thing.
