Free climbing knuckle-biter
Watching Free Solo is genuinely terrifying, genuinely emotional. It’s not just the giddying footage of the 914-metre granite wall of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park that sets your mind spinning, and it’s not just watching free-climber Alex Honnold’s record attempt to conquer the sheer face without rope or harness that makes you realise the increasing scope of human endeavour.
Rather, the reason for both this documentary’s Bafta and Oscars success and the knot that sits in your stomach for almost all of its 100 minutes – especially the spellbinding final 20 minutes – is how invested you become in the project alongside the film-makers.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, director Jimmy Chin described free climbing as a battle between ‘‘perfect execution or certain death’’ and he, his co-director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and their team of crack camerapeople and climbers are having to constantly grapple with the ultimate filmmaking what-ifs.
What if your star dies? Even worse, what if somehow you contribute to that death?
There’s enough background info on Honnold to ensure we know he’s an oddball (he describes himself as having been ‘‘a dark soul, melancholic… a dorky loner’’ as a child until he discovered climbing), and utterly driven (‘‘I’ll always choose climbing over a lady’’ or ‘‘no-one achieves anything by being happy and cosy’’).
But when his good friend and free climbing training partner Tommy Caldwell enthuses that Honnold’s ‘‘attitude to risk makes you feel invincible’’ and goes on to say that, in their sport, that’s a vice rather than a virtue, you realise that this El Capitan climb – and its filming – has absolutely no margin for error.
Death is an ever-present character. Caldwell grimly reminds us that almost every free solo climber in history has died while doing their sport, 25 climbers have died on El Capitan – five since 2013, and even in the course of filming, the team gets word that their mate Ueli Steck has died on Everest.
When Honnold’s longsuffering girlfriend Sanni McCandless tries to talk to him about Steck’s death and how she didn’t want to end up feeling like Steck’s widow Nicole, his reply is blunt: ‘‘What did she expect?’’
While this constant buildup of tension seems to affect everyone involved – to the
extent that camera operators refuse to watch their own footage as he attempts the trickiest sections, and McCandless drives home in tears rather than witness the attempt – it’s only really Honnold who keeps it together. And as he rehearses his grips, holds and manoeuvres, and runs through the nearly four hours of relentless perfection required to conquer the toughest climb in history, it’s clear that he’s not a reckless daredevil, he’s bloody-minded perfectionist.
As Caldwell later wrote in Outside magazine: ‘‘Climbing is an intimate relationship with our world’s most dramatic landscapes, not a self-boasting fight against them. I don’t claim to understand the inner workings of Alex’s mind, but I know one thing for certain: Alex climbs to live, not to cheat death.’’ Although very few of us will choose pursuits in which we face death on a regular basis, we probably all have reasons to live. And by making Free Solo about that specific quality about their friend, Vasarhelyi and Chin have created something we can all buy into emotionally. Terrifyingly emotionally. Find My Murderer streams on TVNZ OnDemand from March 11.
The makers of TVNZ’s new homegrown whodunit Find My Killer don’t have an emotional hook for their show, rather they’re hoping our fixation with social media will snap hold of viewers’ attention. Although tagged as being ‘‘inspired by real events’’, the rather too real similarities to last year’s disappearance and death of Grace Millane meant TVNZ delayed this 10-part series of 10-minute episodes until now.
But as well as the bite-sized streams fitting perfectly between social media updates into a bus commuter’s schedule or 30-minute lunch break, the plot also plays on our online obsessions as a police detective slowly unravels the likes, dislikes, relationships and chaotic final moments of 17-year-old Mia Bryant.
Apart from the occasional dead-weight dialogue (‘‘the data knows us better than our mothers’’, ‘‘digital information doesn’t lie, people do’’), the idea that our online footprints can be tracked to solve any sort of mystery is a nice conceit, and ably handled in a fast-paced format.
It’s not really small screen entertainment as we’re used to it, but still a successful experiment in how our virtual selves can suit alternative storylines and programme styles.
Free Solo screens tomorrow at 7.30pm, National Geographic, Sky Channel 72. It will also be available On Demand from March 11.
The 10-part, 10-minute web-series Find My Killer streams on TVNZ OnDemand from Monday, March 11.