Martin Campbell · 2000 · survival

Martin Campbell's 2000 film. Three years after cutting his father's rope on a desert tower, Peter Garrett is photographing snow leopards below K2 when his sister joins a summit push funded by a millionaire in a hurry. The climb is caught by weather, three survivors are trapped in a crevasse, and a rescue is mounted with nitroglycerin.

1. 1
   Monument Valley

   On a sandstone tower in the desert, a family climb goes wrong and Peter Garrett cuts the rope holding his father to save his sister and himself - a decision that ends his climbing and very nearly ends the family.

2. 2
   Islamabad

   Three years on, the expedition assembles in Pakistan: a millionaire who needs the summit for a publicity deadline, a team who can see the weather coming, and a schedule that leaves the mountain no say in it.

3. 3
   K2 base camp

   At base camp on the Godwin-Austen glacier, the summit party goes up against advice - and when the storm hits, three of them end up alive at the bottom of a crevasse with a barometer falling and hours of air.

4. 4
   K2

   The rescue goes up the mountain carrying nitroglycerin to blast the ice open, in cold that makes the stuff unstable - and the climb costs considerably more lives than the accident it is trying to undo.