DVD 'Touching the Void' film takes sports to the extreme

If you're squeamish, you might not want to watch this movie.
By MARK RAHNER
SEATTLE TIMES
"Touching the Void" (MGM, R) isn't just a harrowing tale -- it's an astounding survival adventure that will make you ask: "Could I have done that?" Or: "Would I have had the brains never to have tried climbing a previously unscaled Peruvian mountain in the first place?"
Stick your crampon into this: Skateboarding castrations, skydiving splats and climbing deaths aren't tragedies. Cancer is a tragedy. They're natural selection at work among suicidally bored numbskulls like Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who happened to survive their recreation by the skin of their REI-covered posteriors.
The documentary features breathtaking, tense dramatizations of the pair's 1985 ordeal first made famous in Simpson's book. On their descent, Simpson destroys one leg in a fall whose mere description hurts: The impact drives his lower leg into his knee joint. Yates attempts to lower him down the mountain by rope but accidentally lowers him over a cliff. The story of what happened to them both after that, with the two telling part of it in interviews, will make you squirm in your easy chair and clutch your beer with white knuckles inside your comfortably heated home.
What's riveting
Their frankness about events is especially riveting. For instance, the helper at base camp admits to wishing that if one of the two had eaten it, he'd have preferred it to be the one he liked less.
Simpson recalls, "It was like somebody was just teasing an ant and putting something in its way all the time, and was eventually going to stand on it." This is because people are soft, pulpy things that stop working when you puncture them or drop them. But of course, they both continued to climb, even doubling for the actors playing them.
There's some repetition in the DVD extras, but don't skip "What Happened Next," which details, ah, what happened after the movie's climax. Another featurette shows the climbing partners enlisted to help make the film getting surly after they've been on the shoot for a while.