Free Solo (2018) on Netflix
PG-1320181h 40mAdventureDocumentarySport
Alex Honnold dreams of free soloing Freerider, the 3,000 foot route up El Capitan in Yosemite, with no ropes and no safety gear. No climber has ever done it.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb8.1/1088,715 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
El Capitan, the 3,000 foot wall in Yosemite, has never been free soloed, and Alex Honnold intends to be the first. The Freerider route he has chosen, opened by Alexander Huber in 1998, has been climbed by Honnold only with protection. He is a shy loner who has lived in his van for years, and he is now sometimes joined by his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless. On one descent she feeds his rope through a grigri incorrectly and he falls, breaking vertebrae. In 2016 he travels to Morocco to prepare, while a film crew works out where to put cameras without distracting him, weighing whether to document a climb on which he could die. A scan shows little activity in his amygdala under intense stimuli.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Free Solo (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Because Honnold climbed too far from the crew for wireless microphones to pick up his voice, the filmmakers built a custom sound-recording device and had him carry it inside his climbing chalk bag.
- Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin wrestled with the ethics of making a film in which their subject, Alex Honnold, could die on camera, and only proceeded after careful planning to avoid distracting or pressuring him during the climb.
- Free Solo's opening weekend per-venue average of $75,201 broke the all-time record for a documentary, previously held by An Inconvenient Sequel, and also beat Eighth Grade for the best per-venue average of 2018.
