Honnold’s ‘Free Solo’ Movie Has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes

Alex Honnold’s first free-solo of El Capitan via Freerider 5.13 will go down as one of the boldest free-solos of all time.

The new film Free Solo by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin has gone on to win awards and is receiving high praise from the film industry.

The film is trending at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, a score often reserved for the very best films circulating the cinemas.

Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal said it’s “a brilliant documentary.”

In the past, climbing’s great achievements have been celebrated in pubs and huts, far away from people who don’t understand the significance.

But over the past decade, climbing has become so popular that films such as Meru and Valley Uprising are among the most-watched sports films on Netflix.

And while non-climbing media has long struggled with the nuances and terminology, they are slowly adapting to the fast-growing sport.

Non-climbing media and climbing media has different goals when it comes to reporting about blockbuster climbing films.

Climbing media’s goal is to understand the complexity of a climb or climbs being featured and to not dumb things down while trying to look deeper. Non-climbing media’s goal to write about how mind-blowing and dangerous climbing is.

Joe Livingstone recently wrote in The New Republic that Honnold’s ascent “seems to be a suicide mission.”

Livingstone went on to write, “Honnold is such an intense version of the character that he pushes the archetype past its ordinary boundaries. He isn’t just fearless; he doesn’t know fear. He doesn’t just risk his life; he cares almost nothing for it. The classic tension between the sublime and the human spirit breaks down. Man, rock, camera: they’re old suspects, but here they seem made anew.”

Free Solo is also being called the “the best climbing movie ever made” by Outside. Peter Vignerson said, “Should the rest of us watch him climb? In the months since I first watched Free Solo, I haven’t settled on a satisfying answer. Honnold sometimes strikes me as a tragic figure, wrapped so tight that he can’t acknowledge how much pain he causes those who care about him.”

Even Rolling Stone got in on the action with an interview with Honnold that you should read here. In it, Joe McGovern said, “In person, 33-year-old Honnold, just under six feet tall and gangly, is as captivating as he is onscreen. His eyes are so large that the crew on Free Solo referred to him as ‘Bambi,’ yet they’re also shark-like — eerily calm and penetrating. Before the movie’s premiere, he spoke with Rolling Stone about depression, spirituality and what he believes happens when we die.”

And David Simms wrote in The Atlantic, “Honnold exists in a community that’s besieged with death; all of the climbers he meets up with and talks to over the course of the film have a fatalistic air to them. But even within this group, Honnold is regarded as a risk taker. In Alone on the Wall, a memoir published not long before he began his first preparations for El Capitan, Honnold describes his mentality during a climb as ’empty.’

“He’s aware of the danger—there’s not much room for recklessness in free soloing—but his success partly requires him to not think about his potential death and injury. Honnold isn’t robotic (he’s actually somewhat goofy, at times), but when confronted with a difficult question, like the future he imagines with McCandless, he shuts down rather than interrogate it further.”

In a recent article published by National Geogrpahic, Peter Gwin talks about how Jimmy Chin filmed Honnold’s free solo. He said, “During the climb Honnold averaged a blistering 100 vertical feet every seven and a half minutes. To capture each move, Chin and the crew rappelled to key spots along the route. In the diciest sections, they set up remote cameras to avoid disrupting Honnold’s concentration.” Read the article here.

One of the first pieces to be published after the film’s premiere was in Vannity Fair, where Richard Lawson said, “Is Alex Honnold of sound mind? Free Solo delves a little into this, with both wry whimsy and serious inquiry. On the more lighthearted side, we see Honnold get a brain scan, and then a doctor, sounding a bit amused, explaining to him that he has an extremely high threshold for stimuli.

“Essentially, what startles us normies, triggers in us an innate aversion, barely registers to Honnold. He’s like a superhero whose superpower is near fearlessness.”

As climbing grows and more people are exposed to the great and not-so-great achievements of the sport, we’ll rely on great videographers like Jimmy Chin to capture the real and raw emotions of the sport.

Pretty excited to hear that Free Solo has won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. But I’m even more excited that now that the film is being released I can finally see all the pictures that @jimmy_chin has shot with me over the last few years of film making. I never got to see any of the material while we were shooting – seeing it now is a nice way to revisit two years of great climbing. This is a shot of Freestone, a route that, as the old guide book said, is probably harder than Astroman (despite being shorter). And being up there with Yosemite Falls raging behind definitely adds to the ambiance. Gotta love Yosemite! @natgeo @mochinyc And for anyone curious: @freesolofilm opens in theaters September 28th. Get psyched!

A post shared by Alex Honnold (@alexhonnold) on Sep 17, 2018 at 10:42am PDT