What can I say about "Touching The Void"? I'm a sucker for a good survival story, and "Touching The Void" is one of the best of them. It's a true story, the film interspersing dramatizations of real events with interviews with the actual survivors, which is a tactic I ordinarily don't like very much but here is applied to such an incredible true tale that I have no problem with it.

Two mountaineers are climbing in the remote Andes, thirteen miles over rough glacial moraine from their remote base camp, when a storm sets in. Tethered together by a rope, one slips, and dangles over a sheer cliff, suspended hundreds of feet in the air. The other climber, unable to gain secure enough footing to pull him back up, is instead slowly being pulled down towards the edge by the weight. Knowing that if he goes over they will both plunge into the chasm, he makes the tough decision and cuts the rope, letting the dangling climber fall to his death. Once the storm abates, he descends the mountain and hikes back to base camp alone.

What he doesn't know is that the climber he cut loose, presumably to fall to his death, upon hitting the ground, broke through what was not ground at all but just a thin crust of ice over a deep crevasse. He awoke on a small ice ledge deep in the crevasse, halfway up the wall, far from both the top and the bottom, with both his legs shattered.

This tells the story of how, on his own, he escaped the crevasse, made the difficult descent and 13 mile hike over glacial morraine from the mountain on two broken legs, to finally make it to back to base camp and then back to civilization, and survive to tell the whole tale in his own words in this movie. Not to mention the details of what happens when the haggard figure of a man who everyone thinks was recently killed appears in a remote mountain camp in the middle of the night, which is a story all by itself.

If that's your cup of tea, this movie is the good stuff. It's an incredible story.

By the way, the man who miraculously made it through the ordeal alive said at the time, and has ever since, that is climbing partner's decision to cut his rope was the right choice in a survival situation. There was never any blame between them. In that moment the only available choice was between letting a man die, or both of them dying. And, as it worked out, by an incredible combination of fate and determination, neither of them did.