Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Aftershock: Everest and the Nepal Earthquake’ on Netflix, A Docuseries That Should Just Be a Feature

You could be forgiven for not remembering the 2015 natural disaster at the heart of Aftershock: Everest and the Nepal Earthquake, a new Netflix docuseries from director Olly Lambert. But through jaw-dropping footage of a Nepalese earthquake and its aftershocks that disrupted expeditions to Everest, viewers are now unlikely to forget. Over three episodes, a wide array of affected individuals tell their stories about needing salvation from the ravages of Mother Nature.

AFTERSHOCK: EVEREST AND THE NEPAL EARTHQUAKE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In April 2015, an earthquake registering 7.8 magnitude rocked Nepal — killing 9,000 and leaving 3.5 million homeless. The impact around Mount Everest was particularly notable given the avalanche it triggered, imperiling many climbers and the associated participants of the economy around them. Through an alternation of astonishing footage of the quake’s impacts and reflective talking head interviews, Olly Lambert pieces together a wide-ranging look at the extent of the devastation and how it affected the many people and groups involved.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Rescue documentaries like mountain-set Touching the Void or cave-set The Rescue are the clearest companion pieces.

Performance Worth Watching: Well, we’re all performing all the time in our daily lives, aren’t we? But from the many talking heads who experienced the events of the film, the journey of Arjun committing his life to faith and running a charity to feed the homeless provides one of the most moving to see come to fruition.

Memorable Dialogue: The interview subjects do not speak much in quotable lines, instead relaying the truth of their experiences in plainspoken observations. Among the interview subjects in the film, the climber Gopal delivers the kind of inspirational triumph over adversity story that people love from these kinds of dramatic rescues: “When people wrote I was HIV positive, it hurt me. But later it became my plus point because instead of taking severely injured people, they moved me first and I was so grateful.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing of the sort as the survival impulse is the natural bodily force driving forward everyone who experienced the events.

Our Take: Aftershock, as a docuseries, is all over the place. Lambert ultimately casts too wide a net with all the people his work features, which dilutes the project’s potency by shutting off the possibility of any one central figure emerging. All portraits of interviewees feel surface-level at best, and under-examined at worst. It’s hard to keep up with all the different threads he’s juggling at once. The rote, repetitive documentary style of talking head interviews interspersed with the footage of the disaster has a lulling effect with its mundanity and unoriginality.

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Our Call: SKIP IT! There’s probably a YouTube video that can compress all the information and emotion of Aftershock into a much more compact time frame. The series never justifies 2.5 hours and 3 episodes of its viewers’ time.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.