The Everest documentary by a French YouTuber achieves greatness.

The pitch is a timeless one: a young, famous person, lacking any prior climbing expertise and training, manages to ascend Mount Everest, triumphing despite a significant number of obstacles.

The story was brought to life by French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, also known as Inoxtag, in a two-hour-plus documentary chronicling his year of training for the ultimate challenge. “Kaizen,” the movie, was a huge hit when it came out this past weekend. In its first day on YouTube, the video had over 11 million views, with young fans in Paris queuing up for a preview screening. The website claimed that it was “undoubtedly one of the biggest launches in the history” of YouTube in France, but an AFP representative was unable to provide an exact rating.

Since he began sharing video game videos in his mid-teens, the 22-year-old content maker has become a French sensation because of his electrifying enthusiasm. He has over 10 million followers on various platforms in addition to over eight million YouTube subscribers.

“I’ve always enjoyed going on adventures; when I was younger, they were on video games,” he stated in a pre-release interview with AFP. He claimed he wanted these encounters to be genuine after becoming fixated on “Minecraft” and “Fortnite” for years.

“Irrational objectives”

Inoxtag posts persistently cheery content and challenges films like “30 Seconds to Save a Life” or “Five Days to Walk Across Corsica,” but also claims a real concern for the environment.

His film blends important topics like pollution and over-tourism with the kind of tense and intimate moments that one would anticipate from an online documentary. Although the French press has not exactly embraced the film, fans have been going crazy over it.

Though others later joined Inoxtag on stage in Paris, the journal Liberation accused the filmmakers of erasing the efforts of the Sherpas, the Nepalese who assist climbers with their ascents.

The movie, according to mountaineer and photographer Pascal Tournaire, is “very egotistical,” and the YouTuber hasn’t really accomplished anything, he told the daily L’Equipe.

On the other hand, local media were informed by climber Mathis Dumas, who assisted Inoxtag in getting ready for the climb, that the young star had a “genuine love” for the mountain. And the Parisian moviegoers gathering outside the theatre would not hear any criticism.

Student Lucie Bonin, 19, said, “I know there are plenty of people who climb the mountain and don’t film themselves.” “However, it’s amazing that a YouTuber is amusing us in this way just by establishing such absurd objectives for himself.”

– Japanese design influence

“Kaizen” sounds like it may be from a movie, it most likely is—at least in part. Inoxtag claimed that the 2017 French comedy film “The Climb,” which is based on a true tale about a young man from the outskirts of Paris who decides to climb Everest in order to win over his potential lover, was his inspiration.

The internet celebrity knows that fantasies drive him just as much as worries about actual problems. He told AFP that one of his greatest influences was the renowned Japanese manga artist Eiichiro Oda, whose “One Piece” series holds the record for the highest sales ever.

He added of Oda, “If he happens to see my documentary, I just wanted to say thank you for making me believe that dreams can come true.” At the start of April, the social media celebrity gave his followers a grandiose send-off, promising to abstain from social media for the duration of his rise.

Tension and conjecture followed his disappearance; would he actually reach the summit? Given that he made it to the summit, it should not be too much of a spoiler to say this.

He was also eager to downplay the anxiety leading up to the publication, saying to AFP, “I don’t want everyone to focus too much on whether I succeeded or failed.”

“I want people to see some of the steps I took to get there.”