The Last First: Winter K2 (now on Apple TV) is about way, way more than just a record-breaking trek up the world’s most dangerous mountain. Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary is a tangle of politics, capitalism, class, and what achievement means in the social media era — all of which amplify a terrible tragedy, thus separating this film from more typical stories of triumph.

The Gist: Reaching the 8,000-meter summit of Pakistani mountain K2 during the region’s brutal winter was considered a “holy grail.” Although it’s not as high as Everest, it’s more treacherous, and was the only major mountaineering achievement yet to be reached — hence, the “last first.” All the other peaks had been conquered. Lina Moey describes her husband, pro climber John Snorri Sigurjónsson, as “hooked on the thrill of summiting,” and therefore serially restless during their daily lives raising six children in Iceland. So in 2021, he set K2 as his goal, heading up the mountain with Pakistani father-son sherpas Ali and Sajid Sadpara. 

Not long into the excursion, the trio peered outside their tent and saw Nepalese “rock star” climber Nirmal Purja and his team, who caught wind of Snorri’s attempt and turned the quest into a competition. The two squads’ base camp soon got crowded as climbing-expedition company Seven Summit Treks, stinging from a Covid-derived downturn in business, brought a group of far less experienced adventurers — essentially tourists compared to Snorri and Purja — to attempt the trek. An attempt at a crazy-risky world record had become, well, a clusterf—.

To say the situation became increasingly dodgy is an understatement: A filmmaker arrived to shoot footage; climbers had their own camera crews; national pride became a political pressure point. Purja wanted to reach the summit as a statement for generations of Nepalese sherpas and the Pakistani government wanted to see their mountaineers at the top. Bar-Lev pieces together footage from the expedition to tell this harrowing story, and blame is pushed around among the many key players interviewed here — those who survived to tell the tale, that is.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Free Solo is a similar adrenaline-rush doc, although it’s in many ways the opposite, chronicling Alex Honnold’s one-man climb up the El Capitan rock face in Yosemite National Park.

Our Take: As there are too many people dodging falling rocks and being battered by nasty winds on the side of K2, there are a few too many voices contributing to The Last First; the film is unfocused at times, a blur of talking heads buffered by gripping real-time footage from the expedition. It’s the latter that keeps us engrossed, which finds the simplicity of a man-against-nature, do-it-because-it’s-there story complicated to a dangerous degree when the follies of modern civilization are dragged into the wilderness — e.g., politics, capitalism, and social media-derived narcissism. The doc is as much about (debatably pointless?) human achievement as it is about (often pointlessly?) documenting those achievements. It’s not enough to do something crazy, but one must be seen doing it.

But the emotion, even in relatively diluted form, cuts through. Bar-Lev finds enough clarity amidst the clutter of narrators to adequately convey the sense of peril and catastrophe of these events, punctuated by, say, a dispiriting shot of a fallen climber’s gloves tumbling down a slope. You’ll inevitably notice that no scene of prayer over a corpse in a sleeping bag is too sacred to not be filmed; contrast that with the tears of a grieving widow, a moment of betrayal, and a brief scene of jubilation, and you find yourself pondering the spectrum of the human condition.

Our Call: The Last First admirably guts it out through a complicated narrative, emerging with sadly poignant observations. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.