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Free Solo, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, documents Alex Honnold's ropeless climb of Yosemite's El Capitan. (Spoiler: he's fine!)
It's absolutely spectacular to watch, which was of particular interest to me since I've been to Yosemite often and seen climbers, but only from a very long distance away. Watching someone climb close up - free solo at that - was amazing. It's extremely suspenseful even though you know the outcome. Vasarhelyi and Chin do a great job of making specific points of difficulty comprehensible to non-climbers, so you're not just thinking, "Will he fall?" you're thinking, "How's he going to do on the Boulder Problem?"
But what's just as interesting as the climbing is Honnold himself. The movie is as much a character portrait as a document of an extraordinary physical feat - in fact, it's largely a document of why that particular person is attempting that particular extraordinary feat. At the beginning, you can't imagine why anyone would try it; by the end, you can't imagine why Honnold specifically wouldn't. It's all of a piece of who he is.
By profiling someone who takes what seem to be extreme risks, but from his perspective are both not all that risky and absolutely worth taking, it raises questions of what we owe others, what we owe ourselves, how we balance risk and benefit, and how we weigh glory against length of days.
It's absolutely spectacular to watch, which was of particular interest to me since I've been to Yosemite often and seen climbers, but only from a very long distance away. Watching someone climb close up - free solo at that - was amazing. It's extremely suspenseful even though you know the outcome. Vasarhelyi and Chin do a great job of making specific points of difficulty comprehensible to non-climbers, so you're not just thinking, "Will he fall?" you're thinking, "How's he going to do on the Boulder Problem?"
But what's just as interesting as the climbing is Honnold himself. The movie is as much a character portrait as a document of an extraordinary physical feat - in fact, it's largely a document of why that particular person is attempting that particular extraordinary feat. At the beginning, you can't imagine why anyone would try it; by the end, you can't imagine why Honnold specifically wouldn't. It's all of a piece of who he is.
By profiling someone who takes what seem to be extreme risks, but from his perspective are both not all that risky and absolutely worth taking, it raises questions of what we owe others, what we owe ourselves, how we balance risk and benefit, and how we weigh glory against length of days.
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