Wings Over Everest (2019)

"The slower you go, the further you can reach"

Wings Over Everest felt like a patchwork of other mountain climbing films going back to the Eiger Sanction (1975) or the Archer Sanction (2015) for that matter. It might have worked if they had grounded the mountain climbing in some measure of realism. Not even Yakusho Koji could save it.

What I liked:

There were beautiful shots of the mountains. Score one for Mother Nature!

Yakusho Koji-I would watch him in anything and this film is exhibit A of that dedication.

Austin Lin made for a cute Cowboy helicopter pilot. Zhang Jing Chu as Xiao Dai Zi portrayed a feisty heroine who did what was needed to be done to save herself and her team.

The cast was an interesting international crew: China, Japan, Canada, and Taiwan though with some questionable dubbing at times.

What didn’t work as well:

The bad guys were obvious and their motivation was weak.

The opening scene let the audience know to check their brain at the door regarding mountaineering and rescue. Dai Zi may have been a great climber but she had a terrible habit of falling off of cliffs. I stopped counting at 4 times. Perhaps due to unacknowledged oxygen deprivation or hypothermia, she also had strange hallucinations.

Oxygen schmoxygen. Who needs it? Or protective goggles? Or any gear to protect from the frostbiting wind and cold, not to mention (literally) blinding sun.

I know the final mountain scene was supposed to be touching yet was so ridiculous it reminded me of a scene from Ice Age: Collision Course (2016). Why couldn’t there have been a dinosaur or UFO? Go all in on throwing logic off the mountain! That might have bumped my score up!

There were times when I turned my brain off that the film had its moments, but they were few and far between. Stupid logic and stupid laws of physics interfering with movie magic. To “summit” up and not to “be-lay” the point but Wings Over Everest was an okay movie if you like the actors and/or scenery but it likely won’t “rock” your world.

27 April 2026

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