Free Solo
This documentary by the husband and wife team of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin shows them following their friend Alex Honnold in his ambition to climb a 3000 feet high sheer granite face i present Yosemite Park known as El Capitan, or El Cap for short. It is something he has climbed several times before, but always with a friend, and always with ropes, anchor points, and usually a helmet. This time, he intends to do it without any form of support or protective equipment, a type of climbing known as free soloing.
The trailer gave me the impression that the documentary would just follow the climb, but it is much more than that as you get to know Honnold’s upbringing, his mother, new girlfriend, friends, see the impact of a fall which led to a sprained ankle and compound fracture of his lower back, and his rehab from those injuries. Another medical component of the film features the results of an MRI scan on Honnold’s brain which reveals that his amygdala barely responds when exposed to frightening situations which have a 'normal brain' displaying a huge amount of activity.
There is also the ethical part of this documentary because, as Jimmy Chin explains, he could be filming and watch his friend simply fall through the frame, most likely to his death. Because this mixes the mundane and the extreme, from shopping for a fridge freezer with his girlfriend for their newly bought house in Las Vegas to preparing his mind and body for the climb by scaling incredibly difficult rock faces in Morocco and then returning to El Capitan for trial runs to make scrupulous notes of every aspect of the wall and exactly what he would need to do in any given situation – it's a bit like a race driver doing multiple laps of a race track in preparation for a perfect lap without any helmet, harness, or crumble zones on the car knowing that one mistake would result in your death. The very real possibility of this is reinforced with the names of people who have died free soloing, and when. Indeed, the film is dedicated to Ueli Steck, a German climber who died when falling 1000 feet when free soloing in Nepal, an incident which happened during filming.
The film benefits from a superb score by Marco Beltrami which makes the tense climbing sequences even more (if you pardon the pun) gripping and it is something that made me forget what I knew at times so I had to remind myself of how it should finish. I saw it at a fairly small local cinema in the smallest screen they have and wish it had been on a much bigger screen (I don't know if I could have coped with IMAX) for maximum impact.
Free Solo is a remarkable documentary and I would urge you to take any chance you have to watch it, preferably on a big screen. I would love to watch it again, whether at the cinema or at home.
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