The Most Preposterous Mountain Climbing Scene in a Film?

Shivaay is a Bollywood film, which are, of course, not particularly known for technical accuracy. This Hindi language film from 2016 features an Indian mountain guide named Shivaay who gets involved in trying to stop a trafficking ring in Budapest. Naturally, he uses some of his mountain-climbing skills in the film:

While both Hollywood and Bollywood films will often play loose with the laws of science, this scene probably did convince many inexperienced viewers that the stunts were theoretically possible. In a film that doesn’t involve fantasy (supernatural) elements or science fiction, I find it a little disappointing that it wasn’t created just a bit more realistically. Mountain climbing is adventurous enough at times, and physically demanding enough that impossible feats do not need to be injected into it.

This scene goes well beyond just a little exaggeration, imparting superpowers upon the main character.

When he back-flips off the cliff, he takes his time before trying to slam his hooks into the mountainside to stop falling. If that happened in reality, the guy would likely dislocate both shoulders, if the hooks didn’t simply rip out of his hands. He’s descending so close to the mountainside and at such speed that it would be likely to catch on a protruding rock, knocking you out of control of the fall, injuring you, or causing you to spin.

His ice axe tools do not look like most I’ve come across, and I hate to tell him that his harness is on backwards. Clearly, they did not use an expert on mountain climbing as a consultant for realism during the filming.

He comes to a stop over a cave, and manages to jerk the hooks loose, doing another flip, to fly face-down/pronate, putting away one hook, then he manages to keep falling while touching the mountain face with his feet to start himself spinning, and plants the other hook while spinning like a top, and that hook is now connected to him and a rope.

Once the hook/axe is planted (it’s planted perfectly to be very stable in a lightning-fast movement, compared to normal climbing where one carefully places the axe, and tests it for stability).

The rope plays out now as he is falling, faster and faster (remember, he’s accelerating due to gravity if this is Newton’s universe) and the bundle of rope unravels super-fast, magically not entangling itself, and he’s abruptly swinging on the end of that rope, clinging to a lope of it when it’s all unrolled.

At that point, if he’d been holding the rope when he hit the bottom of that length of fall, it would’ve yanked out of his hands, at minimum. If not yanked out, he would have had his fingers yanked off, hand or elbows disjointed, or shoulders pulled out of socket (a second time). There are a number of webpages that conjecture about the potential for pulling limbs off when falling and grabbing something (example), and it seems like one just about could not accomplish falling from a great height and stopping with a jerk of the hands and arms without serious injuries. One source I saw said that the largest length of fall without dislocation may be around 10 meters. Clearly, Shivaay falls quite a bit further than that, twice.

He then swings, oblivious to the injuries he should’ve already sustained, lets loose of the rope entirely to ski on his shoes down a brief, inclined ledge (still amazingly not tripping over any protruding rock or falling off, etc).

He switches from skiing the ledge to running down it the remaining distance, and then leaps across a crevasse in the mountainside to a matching ledge area on the other side, rapidly moving along that ledge until he makes a few HOPS down the mountainside, and then he pushes out from the mountain, twisting around to fly over to some fir trees. (It looks as though he has soared a bit farther horizontally than physics would allow at that point.)

From his leap across the air, he grabs the fir tree’s branches which bend downward, allowing him to slip loose and he swoosh-slides along the ground in front of a group waiting for him, in a flourish of snow thrown up by his sliding into first base.

I’m still struggling to count the instances where this scene broke various rules of physics and physiology.

The mountains in the film are truly beautiful, composed from location shots in the Balkan mountains of Bulgaria, as well as in Hyderabad and Uttarakhand.