Free Solo

Would you scale a three-thousand-foot wall of sheer granite without a rope? Good, we wouldn’t either. But it’s impossible to not be gripped—and terrified, and thrilled, and out of verbs—by climber Alex Honnold’s 2016 free solo ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan, a feat previously thought to be impossible. The climb is recorded in the National Geographic documentary Free Solo, which screens at NCMA on Friday. Extreme sports generally inspire extreme reactions: free soloing, in particular, is usually regarded by experts as either reckless behavior with a death wish or as the purest articulation of the human body. Honnold is a compelling subject, and there is nothing about the technical choreography that he carefully plots out in the documentary that will lead you to believe he takes the feat lightly. Still, as you watch him scale a fearsome glass-like portion of granite that requires a technique called “friction climbing,” it is hard not to feel somehow implicated by the act of watching someone take such great risk. Perhaps, though, these ethical polarities are the mark of a documentary that takes its job seriously. You’ll walk away from the film with hands tingling and mind racing.