Free Solo

The climb no one had done

Free Solo is a 2018 documentary directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. It follows the rock climber Alex Honnold as he prepares to climb El Capitan, the granite wall of about 3,000 feet in Yosemite National Park, without a rope or any protection. This style is called free soloing: if the climber makes one mistake, he falls and dies.

The documentary premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2018, won the People's Choice Award for documentaries at the Toronto International Film Festival and opened in US theaters that September. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. National Geographic Documentary Films produced it.

Honnold has picked a route called Freerider, first climbed by Alexander Huber in 1998. He has climbed it many times with ropes. The documentary explains that it is graded 5.13a, and that no one had ever free soloed a big wall at that level of difficulty. Most of the documentary covers the two years of preparation. The climb itself comes at the end.

A man built for the wall

The documentary spends time on who Honnold is. He lives in a van and travels from cliff to cliff. He is shy, blunt and focused. He keeps journals of every climb and rehearses each sequence of moves until he knows them by heart.

He talks about his childhood. His family, he says, did not hug, and the word "love" was not used at home. He describes feeling lonely at school and carrying deep self-loathing as a young man.

In one scene, Honnold agrees to a brain scan. Researchers show him intense images while an MRI measures his brain. His amygdala, the part of the brain linked to fear, shows little response. The documentary does not claim this explains him, but it raises the question of whether he feels fear the way others do. Honnold's own view is that fear can be trained: he rehearses a move until it no longer feels frightening.

Love and risk

The second thread is personal. Honnold has a new girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, and the documentary follows the relationship as it grows. She is warm and open where he is reserved. She also brings a new kind of pressure. Before, Honnold had only himself to consider. Now someone else would grieve if he fell.

During a roped climb, McCandless makes a mistake with the rope as he comes down, and he falls and suffers compression fractures in his back. Later, he sprains his ankle on the lower part of Freerider. The injuries push back his plans. They also raise a quiet question that runs through the documentary: does love make a free soloist more careful, or more distracted?

The two buy a house together in Las Vegas, a step toward a settled life that sits uneasily beside his plan.

The crew's dilemma

The third thread is about the people holding the cameras. Jimmy Chin and his crew are expert climbers and Honnold's friends. They plan where to hang ropes and cameras on the wall so they can record the climb without distracting him. The documentary makes their doubts part of the story. They ask on camera whether their presence adds pressure, and whether they will have to watch their friend die.

Honnold's longtime climbing partner, Tommy Caldwell, helps him prepare, including a trip to climb in Morocco. The two work on Freerider together with ropes while Honnold describes the sections that worry him. One is a pitch Honnold calls the Boulder Problem, where he plans to use an unusual move: a wide "karate kick" across a blank section of rock. Honnold rehearses it again and again on a rope.

News arrives that the Swiss climber Ueli Steck, whom Honnold knew, has died in the mountains. Honnold reflects on his own risk-taking, and Caldwell notes how little the news seems to shake Honnold.

The attempt that stopped

In the fall of 2016, Honnold starts up Freerider without a rope. Low on the wall, after the smooth slab section, he decides it does not feel right and stops. He gives up for that season. Chin worries aloud that the camera crew helped push Honnold into trying before he was ready.

The documentary treats this retreat as a strength, not a failure. It shows a climber who will walk away when his mind is not right, and directors who are willing to show their own doubts.

June 3, 2017

On June 3, 2017, Honnold tries again. McCandless leaves before he starts, and the documentary records her worry. The crew takes their places. Some of them can barely watch; one camera operator turns away at the hardest moments.

The documentary shows the climb as a steady sequence: the slab at the bottom, the Boulder Problem, where Honnold makes the karate kick move, and the last pitches to the top. He reaches the summit after 3 hours and 56 minutes. He seems calm, almost plain about it. Later he talks about his future in climbing and what free soloing means to him.

The crew recorded the climb with experienced climbers on the wall, cameras on the ground and a helicopter, and Honnold carried a small sound recorder in his chalk bag. The resulting images give the documentary much of its force.

What the critics say

Most reviews were strongly positive and praised the climbing footage and the crew's openness about the ethics of recording a possible death. Vikram Murthi of The A.V. Club argued that the documentary's attempts to explain Honnold through his childhood feel pat, that the relationship thread is a distraction and that the final climb is too short on screen. Peter Debruge of Variety noted a slow stretch around the hour mark.

Who should watch it

Watch it if you want to see what extreme preparation looks like and how one person manages fear. It suits anyone interested in mastery, risk or the ethics of recording someone who might die on camera.