Documentary Review: Free Solo

Free Solo (2018)

Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin

Written by Documentary

Starring Alex Honnold, Tomy Caldwell 

Release Date September 28th, 2018

Published September 26th, 2018 

Free Solo is one of the most strange and harrowing experiences I have had at the movies in 2018. This deification of free climber Alex Honnold which attempts to portray Honnold as a heroic figure and not a man with a death wish or a callous disregard for life, is also wildly, enthralling. Free Solo contains a full 20 minute sequence that is one of the most riveting of this or any year as we watch Honnold do something no one has ever done before and lived to tell. 

Free Solo introduces Alex Honnold as a legend already in progress. Among rock climbers, Alex is a God. Alex has made some of the most difficult climbs in history, all around the globe and all without the use of safety equipment. What Alex does is called Free Solo and it very simply means that he climbs mountains without the use of a rope, a harness or anything else that could keep him alive if he were to lose his grip and fall from hundreds of feet in the air. 

We meet a restless Alex as he is once again pondering an attempt at the most difficult Free Solo Climb on American soil. No one in history has completed a free solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park in California but Alex has had the idea to do it for some time. As Alex recounts in the documentary, he had been to ‘El Cap’ three years in a row with the intent of possibly making the attempt at a free solo, only to back out. 

Nerves are a rarity for Alex and we don’t really know what it was that drove him to abandon his previous attempts. Was he afraid? Did his research of the mountain, climbing with safety equipment, discourage him? Don’t expect to find out much about Alex’s thought process. A key scene in Free Solo has Alex undergo an MRI to see if his brain works any differently than normal people and indeed, his amygdala, the part of the brain that senses an emergency or fear, is less active than the average brain. So, we can rule out fear, for the most part. 

Were it not for Alex’s girlfriend, a non-climber named Sanni, we might not learn much of anything about Alex beyond his climbing exploits. He’s not a big personality, he’s not particularly charismatic, he’s friendly enough but if you were to ask about anything other than climbing rocks it’s easy to imagine his level of discomfort or disinterest in any other topic. Rock Climbing is everything for Alex Honnold and El Cap is the closest thing he has to a religious experience. 

Free Solo was directed by Honnold’s friends Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin a married couple and fellow climbers who’ve been with Alex for a few years. They too have an obsession with climbing as their previous director effort was Meru which followed Chin’s ascent of the 4000 foot mountain climb in the Himalayas on a rock known as ‘the shark fin.’ Rock climbing, as portrayed in Meru and especially here in Free Solo is portrayed as pure obsession. 

There is a dark complexity to Free Solo that is inescapable for those of us in the audience. Free Solo at once is quite direct about the danger of free solo climbing and yet still manages to portray Alex Honnold as a hero. There is a sequence in Free Solo in which we hear about the number of people, some of whom are contemporaries of Alex, men he had admired and emulated who have died, falling from incredible heights during a free solo climb. 

Alex is almost indifferent to these facts. Alex is downright callous in his disregard of how these men died. The filmmakers are similarly unaffected by these scenes that they chose to include. They don’t so much as confront Alex with these men’s deaths as offer these men's’ lives as a plot point in order to demonstrate how incredible what Alex is doing truly is. It’s not hard to imagine that these scenes are in the movie simply to deflect the idea that they are simply making a hagiography of Alex that glories in his manly pursuit of his dangerous vocation. 

That would, at least, be a more honest movie. Instead, what we get is a movie that is rather dismissive of how dangerous free solo climbing is in favor of showing how cool free solo climbing is. Indeed, I cannot deny that free solo climbing is cool looking. I can’t sit here and pretend I wasn’t riveted with car wreck fascination over Alex’s climb, even as I knew he had survived it. Much like Nascar, we pretend that this is about the remarkable challenge but we secretly, darkly, are watching for something horrible that might happen. 

Do I recommend Free Solo? Yes, it’s undeniably compelling even as it is uncomfortably uncritical of how it glorifies an activity that will get more than a few people killed. Free Solo will inspire someone to want to try what Alex did. You could say this about a number of different movies but there is something more disquieting about Free Solo and how it appears to invite new daredevils to be the next Alex by making him a hero just for not falling to his death. 

The lengthy segment of Free Solo in which Alex Honnold is making his climb to the top of El Capitan is among the most exciting, unnerving and compelling scenes in any movie in 2018. There are very few words, just grunts and brief sounds updating the crew on where Alex is on the mountain. The crew is just as transfixed as we are and while the silence was certainly a dramatic choice, it was also because they are as absorbed in this sight as we are. These scenes are why I can’t dislike Free Solo even as I am uncomfortable with it.