An ascent to end all ascents
Free Solo (E, 97 mins) Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★★
Itruly believe that any human life, properly filmed and edited, could yield a good documentary. But for a really extraordinary film, I think you need a really extraordinary life. By any standards, Alex Honnold is living that life.
He is probably the greatest free climber who has ever breathed. Free climbing is rock climbing, but without ropes.
If you make one single error, or lose your grip for one nano-second, you die. Free climbing is so ridiculously dangerous that only 1 per cent of serious climbers ever commit to it. And of those who have, most seem to have died.
A few years ago – although he had been thinking about it for a decade – Honnold decided to climb El Capitan (To-to-kon oo-lah to the local Miwok people), a 975 metre vertical slab of pale granite sitting at the heart of the Yosemite National Park, in California’s Sierra Nevada.
To put that in context, Auckland’s Sky Tower is 328m. The Empire State Building is around 440m to the very tip of its mast.
And ‘‘El Cap’’ isn’t just high. It is also a brutally technically challenging climb. Once you are past the first 150m or so, the climb back down becomes impossible.
As far as anyone knows, free climbing El Cap has never been attempted before, because to not succeed means certain death.
As one of Honnold’s friends says before the attempt, ‘‘it’s like an Olympic Gold Medal final, and if you don’t win the Gold, you get killed’’.
As the climb begins, the same friend mutters off-camera ‘‘let’s hope it’s a low-gravity day’’, which I think will be my favourite line of dialogue for 2018.
Around Honnold are his support team – mostly comprising his girlfriend Sanni and one old friend – and a camera crew assembled by co-director Jimmy Chin, who are also mostly trusted friends and colleagues from the international climbing fraternity.
Mortality, and what it actually means to be alive are at the heart of Free Solo. Beyond the gorgeousness of the land, the pulse-pounding cinematography, the almost superhuman feats of strength, bravery, endurance and focus that are the daily bread of a high-wall free-climber, this is a film of pure existentialism. The climb is the purpose of the climb. The reason is as perfect as it is perfectly illogical.
Even as we maybe grow impatient to get to the day of the attempt, which arrives surprisingly late in the film, we are being slowly entwined in a deft and very cleverly assembled human narrative.
There is love here, and an exploration of Alex’s unique psyche. By the time he takes the first no-going-back step, we know exactly what the stakes are for the people around him, even if Alex remains almost comically unaware of how much he means in these people’s lives.
Free Solo is a fantastic, unrepeatable film. Whether or not you know how it ends, you will be literally on the edge of your seat for a great deal of it, and entranced from beginning to end.
On the biggest screen you can find, this is one of the most impressive and memorable films of 2018.