In the new movie “Everest,” which is about an expedition on that mountain in 1996, the most poignant of the five deaths portrayed onscreen is one that hews carefully to real events. The mountaineer Rob Hall (played by Jason Clarke) is trapped overnight near the summit in violent weather, and he is unable to descend the following day. In a moment likely adapted from transcripts of radio exchanges that occurred that weekend, Hall’s team at Base Camp patches him through to his pregnant wife in New Zealand, who desperately encourages him to keep moving. But with his oxygen regulator blocked by ice, and his hands and feet freezing into uselessness, he dies on the slopes.

Accurate though it may be, it’s an odd experience to watch the protagonist of a large-scale disaster movie electively lapse into deadly inaction. It’s the most overtly emotive of the movie’s many deaths, and yet the moment still lands strangely. The real Hall was caught in an impossible bind, but the material conditions of his situation don’t feel amenable to dramatization. (In his Times review, A. O. Scott wrote that the film, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, “feels strangely abstract, lacking the gravity of genuine tragedy.”) In the midst of the film’s expensively produced spectacle, the gradual loss of a will to live—a subjective experience by nature—resists being rendered onscreen.

“Everest” tells the stories of two commercial operations that summited on May 10th: Adventure Consultants, led by Rob Hall, and Mountain Madness, led by Scott Fischer. Four members of Hall’s group died, including a guide, Andy Harris, his clients Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba, and Hall himself. Fisher died, but the rest of his group returned. A viewer interested in comprehending the deaths of Hall, Fischer, Harris, Hansen, and Namba will likely find the film lacking.

The journalist Jon Krakauer, who was a member of Hall’s expedition and made it to the summit, has criticized the film for inaccuracies about his actions that weekend. But apart from this and some other inventions—the filmmakers script plausible scenarios for the deaths of Hansen and Harris, about which little is known for sure—“Everest” is largely faithful to the circumstances behind the disaster. There are no unlikely feats of strength, or fantastic rescues, or deus ex machinas. Even so, when characters start dying—dropping off the mountain, or laying down in the snow to freeze—the film has trouble investing their deaths with much emotional weight, and seems unable to shake the values of a Hollywood disaster movie. Why does “Everest” feel so shallow?

Part of the problem may be that it spreads its focus too thin across the cast (in his review, Anthony Lane suggests that the film suffers from overcrowding). There are also considerations of accuracy that limit the kind of dramatic license the film can take. At such high altitudes, mountaineers are physically constrained by heavy clothing, and conversation is difficult and halting. Jon Krakauer recounted the specific restrictions of climbing Everest in his 1997 book on the disaster, “Into Thin Air” (“Everest” is not a direct adaptation of that book, but it follows its arc fairly closely). Krakauer describes an agonizingly slow pace of movement, having to stop and “draw three or four lungfuls of air after each ponderous step.” His book emphasizes the mental debilitation that affected the climbers. Stepping at last on the summit of the mountain, he recalls struggling to care: “So little oxygen was reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child.” Such conditions possibly inhibited the filmmakers from developing substantive scenes to play.

But there’s also a question of whether it’s possible to make the events on Everest dramatically intelligible at all. Despite existing in the popular imagination as an adventurous pursuit, the ascent in Krakauer’s account involved a great deal of inaction and passivity: the route was pre-determined, key logistical decisions had (or should have) been solved in advance, coöperation between climbers was minimal. When things went wrong—faulty radios, unstrung ropes, delays on the path, confusion about oxygen supply—they did so in a variety of small ways that resist undue dramatic emphasis.

Explaining how the situation slid so irretrievably out of control, Krakauer describes an atmosphere of “terminal entropy” around the climbers. Those who made it back to camp were too exhausted to help; those who were still outside were too cold to move. This is not especially ripe material for a screen narrative, especially for a production courting a mass audience. Screenwriting gurus like to insist that the core substance of drama is conflict, but there’s not a lot of traditional conflict here. There’s no villain, no decisive action, and not much argument—just terrible lassitude and growing mental incapacity.

Audiences are entitled to come to a narrative about the untimely death of a real person in the hope of comprehending something about that death—its tragic force, perhaps, or at least an expansive sense of the causes behind it. An earlier film about an abbreviated life, based on another book of Krakauer’s, “Into the Wild,” was also seen as flubbing this opportunity. The book, published in 1996, tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who cut off contact with his family in 1990 and embarked on an itinerant life travelling across the U.S. In April, 1992, McCandless hiked into the Stampede Trail in Alaska, intending to live off the bush. He died in August that year, at the age of twenty-four.

The cause of McCandless’s death has been the subject of much speculation. Krakauer suggests in his book that he was poisoned by a toxic alkaloid on wild potato seeds that he ate. In two pieces for this Web site, Krakauer revised this theory, concluding that the potato seeds actually contain a toxic amino acid called L-canavanine, which could have caused McCandless’s demise.

In addition to the cause, the meaning of McCandless’s death has been debated, too. Admirers hail his rejection of social conformity and materialism. Others deride him as mentally ill, or foolishly unprepared to cope in the wilderness. In 2007, when Sean Penn wrote and directed a film adaptation, critics took exception to Penn’s framing of McCandless’s end. In this magazine, David Denby suggested that Penn “can’t see the egocentricity in a revolt that is as naïve as it is grandly self-destructive.” In Time, Richard Schickel wrote that, by refusing to entertain doubts about McCandless’s course of action, the film is unable to impart to its audience “some sense of tragic consequence.” The truth behind McCandless’s demise, as they saw it, lay unexplored.

It’s easy to imagine McCandless afflicted, in his final days, by a similar kind of entropy to the one faced by the climbers in “Everest.” But in Penn’s depiction, McCandless’s death becomes a traditional dramatic climax in the film’s closing minutes: he meets his demise with a beatific smile across his face, at peace at last. The moment feels undeserved.

Entering the wilderness with insufficient information and meagre survival skills is by many measures a foolish act, and Penn’s film never gets a grip on the essential riskiness in McCandless’s behavior. “Everest” doesn’t suffer from quite so much romanticism, but the climbers’ actions prompt a similar skepticism. Ascending by foot up a cold, snowy, exposed, rocky slope to a point more than twenty-nine thousand feet above sea level (and to certain mental and physical deterioration) is a decidedly avoidable error. Audiences searching for meaning might want to understand what drove the climbers into such a lunatic situation. The film feints at an explanation—two clients quote the climber George Mallory’s reasoning, “Because it’s there”—but it doesn’t dig deeper.