Hard to believe while watching it, but K2 started on Broadway with two actors, one icy ledge and no actual mountain anywhere in sight. Patrick Meyers’ play opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in March 1983, ran for 85 performances and earned Jeffrey DeMunn a Tony nomination. Moving it to film meant inventing nearly everything that happened before those two climbers reached that ledge. Meyers and co-writer Scott Roberts nicely expanded the story outward, while director Franc Roddam faced the much more practical problem of putting cameras where the air gets thin.

Taylor Brooks (Michael Biehn, Aliens) is a hotshot attorney with enough confidence for several people and a mountaineer’s appetite for risk. Harold Jamison (Matt Craven, Indian Summer) is a physics professor, family man and the longtime friend who keeps tying himself to Taylor anyway. Their chance at the big one comes through billionaire Phillip Claiborne (Raymond J. Barry, The Purge: Election Year), who is assembling an expedition to K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth and one considerably less interested in letting climbers come home than Everest. Claiborne initially wants nothing to do with Taylor and Harold. An avalanche during a training climb changes his mind, and before long they’re headed for northern Pakistan.

Roddam may seem like another unusual choice for an adventure film. He had directed Quadrophenia, but before features he spent years making documentaries for the BBC. That instinct to put the camera somewhere real instead of faking everything on a soundstage serves K2 beautifully. Working on peaks in Canada and the Himalayas, cinematographer Gabriel Beristain makes the landscape spectacular without making it inviting. The snowfields stretch forever, the drops look terrifying and the mountain never feels impressed by the people trying to conquer it.

Biehn later admitted he’s afraid of heights, which makes Taylor’s mountain-sized ego even more entertaining. He barrels through the early sections convinced skill and nerve can solve almost anything. Craven gives Harold the conscience Taylor is often missing, and their friendship keeps the movie from becoming nothing more than men versus mountain.

The problems tend to appear whenever everyone comes back down. The pace loosens considerably between climbs, and some of the relationship drama feels like connective material invented because a two-person stage play suddenly needed to fill a feature film.

Once the movie gets higher, though, it strips much of that away. The original play’s central idea comes back into focus: two friends stuck in a place where every decision carries a potentially awful cost. That’s when K2 works best, not as a mountain-conquering fantasy but as a test of friendship conducted somewhere human beings really shouldn’t be hanging around. Long before Free Solo had audiences clutching armrests over a real ascent, Roddam was getting much the same reaction from a fictional one.