Tenzing review – reconstruction of first summit of Everest puts Sherpa at the centre of the story

Here is a well intentioned, watchable, if sometimes soft-edged film with some NatGeo production values and VFX jeopardy on high mountain peaks. The subject is the triumphant Mount Everest expedition of 1953, in which the ultimate ascent was achieved by Nepalese-Indian mountaineer Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Edmund Hillary.

Tenzing, a former Sherpa guide whose unparalleled knowledge of the mountain and exemplary climbing skills earned him promotion to full team member, is played here by Tibetan actor Genden Phuntsok, while Hillary is robustly portrayed by Tom Hiddleston. Screenwriter Luke Davies and director Jennifer Peedom have the decent aim of restoring Tenzing’s achievement to the centre of the narrative, a tale which at the time was resoundingly claimed for Hillary and the British empire: a glorious redemption of Scott’s Antarctic ordeal 41 years earlier and a sign of divine approval for the imminent coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

For years, many assumed that Tenzing was somehow Hillary’s servant or military-style batman, a Sancho Panza figure to whom Hillary had just been sentimentally loyal. But Tenzing is the hero of this story, and the narrative of the great climb with Hillary and expedition leader John Hunt (Willem Dafoe) is interspersed with flashbacks to his early life – not Hillary’s – starting with his awestruck childhood encounter with the legendary British alpinist George Mallory, played in cameo by Johnny Flynn. He starts as an eager boy, passionate about the mountain, for which he uses the Tibetan name Chomolungma (though the name “Mount Everest” is not here stigmatised like “Ayers Rock” or “Snowdon”). His biddable good nature and instinctive mastery of the terrain makes him indispensable to other countries’ expeditions (although these are not featured in the flashback sections) and, finally, to the British.

There are vertiginous moments of peril in the climb, but this is not exactly a bromance between Tenzing and Hillary; it is more a romance between Tenzing and the mountain. Nor is it specifically a rebuke to British imperial arrogance; both men were in their way outsiders to the stiff-upper-lip British club. Hiddleston plays Hillary as frank, thoughtful, practical, with no side to him; Phuntsok maintains Tenzing’s boyish innocence. Would a Tibetan film-maker have immersed us even more thoroughly in Tenzing’s world and excluded the British more? Maybe. At any rate, Genden Phuntsok’s charm carries the picture.