“A mountain climber is 100% an athlete... but I think an hour and twenty minutes is far too long to get to the climb.”
Free Solo? Isn’t that what Princess Leia does at the beginning of Return of the Jedi? ...I kid, I kid.
52-WEEK MOVIE CHALLENGE #13 - A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT AN ATHLETE
I chose this as the next part of my 52-WEEK MOVIE CHALLENGE under the prompt for WEEK #13 - A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT AN ATHLETE. For those of you that have been reading my reviews for a while, you’ll know that I rarely talk about documentaries. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them. There are a few documentaries and docu-series that I’ve loved. However, for obvious reasons, they don’t match virtually any criteria that I have for my rubric. So, I usually have to approach them a little bit differently than usual. For this prompt, I wanted to find a popular documentary featuring a non-traditional athlete, and then I remembered... wait... a lot of people were raving about this film, Free Solo, for a while. In fact, it won an Oscar for the Best Documentary Feature of that year. A mountain climber is 100% an athlete. I knew I had my pick.
Little did I know that this guy has gone on to be featured in a bunch of other dangerous and crazy climbing stunts that are filmed for documentaries and specials. Most recently, he was on a live Netflix special where he climbed a building called Skyscraper Live. While that was more of a spectacle, I would venture a guess to say it was not as technically dangerous as the feat seen in Free Solo. Both are very tall things, and in both cases, you would die if you fell, but a building is constructed with repeated textures on the windows and walls all the way to the top. If you can climb a couple of stories, you basically know what you’re in for all the way up. It makes for a great spectacle regardless, but in Free Solo, he’s climbing something natural with zero repetition and a lot less room for error.
A big chunk of Free Solo isn’t even the climb; it’s the prep work. The mountain that he is climbing in this movie, El Capitan, has been climbed before, of course... he’s not the first or anything. So, those that have climbed it in the past have noted all of the most difficult areas for you to get past in order to climb. This movie operates kind of like a traditional narrative, in that these literal obstacles are his narrative obstacles to get to his goals. He explains very specifically what it takes to pass this obstacle, this trial... whatever the case may be. Throughout the movie, we’re shown that he’s imperfect. He HAS fallen. He has broken bones. For part of the movie, he’s healing from a fall as well. While preparing for the climb, he’s showing up roped up, knowing that one wrong move can result in him falling. This thing that he’s doing is death-defying and nothing anybody has ever wanted to do before, other than him.
What I was surprised to find going in was how little of this movie shows the actual climb. I’m serious when I say the actual climb doesn’t start until roughly one hour and 20 minutes in. For the most part, the only parts of the climb you see are those obstacles he’s meticulously gone over and over throughout the prep portion of the film. You never see any other part of the climb. It’s just from obstacle, to the next obstacle, to the next, and then the movie is over.
This is probably where I get the most miffed. I understand the prep portion of the film is important. It serves a purpose. It shows us who this man is, why he is the way he is, and why he doesn’t necessarily sense fear like the rest of us do. He’s kind of like Spock. He’s smart, he’s meticulous, he’s calculating, and he’s rarely wrong. It was also important to show us the most difficult areas of this mountain first so that when he gets to those moments, we are reminded that, oh man, here we go, this is going to be one of those difficult moments.
However, I think an hour and twenty minutes is far too long to get to the climb. By that point, the movie gives the audience next to no climbing whatsoever. Instead, we get a couple of clips before the movie is over. I would have shown less of the prep work and started the actual climb roughly 30 minutes into the film. I still probably would have cut the actual climb down, since it took him over three hours or something, but I would have shown a majority of it. That’s what I was expecting when I turned on the movie and was kind of disappointed to see so little of it. Skyscraper Live at least understood the assignment, because he climbs that thing live. So, a majority of that was the actual climb. This was not. Which... booo.
Overall, it was a good documentary. I think this guy is a really fascinating, brutally honest guy that knows what he’s doing. I was entertained, regardless of it not really doing what I thought it would.
Unbiased/Technical Score: 44/50 (88%)
Biased/Entertainment Score: 37/50 (74%)
Total/Combined Score: 81/100 (81% or 4/5 on Letterboxd)