This premieres on NatGeo tonight.

Thanks! I have it set to record.

Thank you for the reminder.

I wonder how someone can have no sense of danger and death the way these people seem to be.

isn't it inevitable that this guy is going to fall off a mountain side?

btw I had to put closed caption on because I can barely understand what this guy says.
It sounds like mostly grunts.

These Solo guys must have super strong hands and fingers

It's in the movie. He has an MRI to test his amygdala, and it's muted. So there's no fear response.

Okay. Watched it.

I never had a good feeling about this guy, and the film did nothing to assuage my discomfort. This is a documentary about a guy with a severe personality disorder. It was chilling to discover that as he trains for this big event he falls into a relationship with a woman who appears to have an even more severe personality disorder. Like a groupie that tears a band apart, it was frustrating to watch this naive and narcissistic woman attempt to have a relationship with this severely damaged guy.

Bottom line is, the climbing is amazing, but the personal stuff is shocking. There’s a part of me that thinks the woman was a conceit of the filmmakers to make the guy more relatable. He admits to a life of being unable to meet girls, but then suddenly he has an onscreen romance. A little fishy me thinks.

As as far as the sport goes, I really pray this remains a fringe stunt. This cannot become the future of rock climbing. As I said earlier, I’ve grown up on the sidelines of the sport and this dude is a serious outlier. He does not represent the typical Yosemite big rock climber. I HIGHLY recommend a much better documentary called Valley Uprising. That film does a much better job of telling the story of the men and women who (mostly) took consideration for one another and were congenial, gregarious, generous personalities, who imbue the sport with beauty of mind, body, and spirit. This dude shimmying up the crack literally reminds me of Andy Sirkis’ Gollum character skittering across the rocky landscape. I just can’t stand the guy.

Sidenote: Since watching this I have not been able to get the Luc Besson film The Big Blue out of my mind. That film, which I have always loved, has also always troubled me. (FYI for those that haven’t seen it, it’s a narrative fiction film about competitive deep sea free diving.) I’ve always been drawn to the film, but also extremely frustrated as it’s main character is emotionally distant and his actions become more and more selfish and indefensibly reckless as the film progresses. It’s hard to love a film where the main character is so unlikable. But I felt major correlation between Alex and that film’s diver. Both of them so recklessly in love with their dangerous hobby. Both of them refuse love and human attachment. They throw away the miracle of their life to dwell in places where most were not imbued with the ability to ever venture. Enigmas. Both of them are hard for me to fully wrap my head around. If Free Solo has any value to me personally, it’s that the documentary confirms to me the very real existence of the type of personality depicted in that 1988 film.

Another note. I don’t see how this filmed-on-video thing could have possibly looked good in IMAX. There are times when the depth of field is so shallow! IMAX looks like you’re looking through a window. Deeeeeep focus all the way to the background. This was just ordinary looking.

In IMAX, a shot like this would have everything in focus.