Apple TV's The Last First: Winter K2, Amir Bar-Lev's documentary about the race to make the first winter ascent of K2, premiered worldwide on Friday, 2 October. It runs 98 minutes, and it opened in select cinemas the same day.

Critics have backed it since it opened the Sundance Film Festival in January. POV Magazine called it "peak filmmaking," and Decider's verdict on 2 October was "stream it." The doubts are about focus, not craft, and nobody pretends it's an easy watch.

The last first

K2 sits on the Pakistan-China border in the Karakoram range. At 8,611 metres it's the world's second-highest mountain, and climbers rate it far harder than Everest. An Italian team first reached the top in 1954. As Variety's Owen Gleiberman noted in his Sundance review, by 2020 every one of the world's 14 mountains above 8,000 metres had been climbed in winter except K2. Hence the title. A winter summit of K2 was the last big first left in mountaineering.

Photo: Sallahuddin shah / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0), cropped

Apple's announcement says the film follows the 2021 attempt through Icelandic climber John Snorri Sigurjónsson and a Pakistani father and son, Ali and Sajid Sadpara. They soon found the mountain crowded with "influencer climbers and their film crews, commercial expedition clients and a Nepalese team no longer content to help Westerners achieve mountaineering glory." Apple calls it a story "of strategy and determination, class and caste, money and power." The official trailer is on Apple TV's YouTube channel.

The Nepali team was led by Nirmal "Nims" Purja, the former British soldier who'd climbed all 14 of the 8,000-metre peaks in about six months in 2019. They made the first winter summit. But reviewers point out the film doesn't stop there. Several climbers kept going, and the season turned deadly. Variety reported that five climbers died during the 2020 to 2021 winter attempts, including Spaniard Sergi Mingote. Snorri and Ali Sadpara never came home.

Bar-Lev's earlier films include Long Strange Trip and The Tillman Story. POV Magazine's Jason Gorber describes winter winds at the mountain's precarious base camps reaching "well over 100 km/h," and Variety notes base camp temperatures can drop to 50 below. A lot of the footage was shot by the climbers themselves, on GoPros, phones and the cameras of hired crews.

What the critics praise

The strongest praise came out of Sundance. Gorber called it "an extraordinary portrait" that "rises to similar heights" as Meru, Touching the Void and Free Solo. "This film about a mighty peak is peak filmmaking," he wrote. He praised its "tastefulness about what's shown and what's withheld," and said it manages to be "both unflinching and respectful."

The AV Club's Jacob Oller wrote that "if you were thrilled to get sweaty palms throughout Free Solo, The Last First: Winter K2 will make your blood run cold." He singled out "harrowing nature footage" of avalanches and "murderous winds," and he called the clash between "exploited tourists, reckless experts, proud pros, and the unforgiving mountain" "as brutal and clear as ice."

Decider's John Serba said the documentary is "about way, way more than just a record-breaking trek." He called it "a tangle of politics, capitalism, class, and what achievement means in the social media era." His verdict was that the film "admirably guts it out through a complicated narrative, emerging with sadly poignant observations."

At RogerEbert.com, Nell Minow wrote that "it is heart-wrenching to see footage shot with such optimism, meant to show triumph, instead become a close look at conflict and tragic mistakes." She said the Nepali team's drive to summit "as a matter of national and racial pride" was "worthy of an entire movie on its own."

Where critics hold back

The main complaint is that there's too much story for one film. Serba put it neatly. There are "a few too many voices," he said, and it's "unfocused at times." Oller agreed. He wrote that "just as too many climbers clogged up K2, their stories clog up The Last First," and that some interviewees get to go on too long about their pet angles.

Gleiberman was the toughest of the big reviews. He called the film "engrossing, to a point, but it's not exhilarating." He also argued it gives too little attention to what the Nepali team achieved. He said it's "frankly a little patronizing" that the film "takes the triumph of the Nepalese team and just sort of throws it away." He noted that rumours of wrongdoing by Purja's team "turn out to be false. The Nepalese climbers did nothing wrong," and wrote that "they proved themselves to be extraordinary." Minow read the same material more warmly, as a long-overdue look at who gets the credit on the world's great peaks.

Several critics also raise the ethics of the footage itself. With so many cameras on the mountain, Oller noted, "even when people die, and they do die, there are always a few people standing around, phone in hand, recording." Gorber thought the film turns that question on itself, making "the documentary itself subject to the same concerns of culpability and blame."

Should you watch it

If you liked Free Solo or Meru, the reviews say this one's worth your evening, with one warning. It's rated R, and it's about real people who died, with footage from the mountain after the deaths. Minow called one late scene, where a climber goes back to K2 to find and bury his father, "sobering." Reviewers also mention lighter moments, like a budding romance at base camp and a short burst of celebration.

It's part of a wider moment for films about who gets credit in the mountains. The Australian feature Tenzing screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. It tells the story of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who reached Everest's summit with Edmund Hillary in 1953. And if you're already an Apple TV subscriber, Dark Matter season two is still rolling out weekly.

The Last First: Winter K2 is streaming on Apple TV now. We haven't seen it ourselves, so this is what Apple and the critics say.