Free Solo

Few adventure pictures manage to stick the landing quite like Free Solo, Jimmy Chin’s 2018 release that still gets passed around by people who swear it’s underrated. You can tell a lot about a movie from its tagline, and “Live beyond fear.” gives away the game in the best way.

Strip away the craft and the premise is simple — Follow Alex Honnold as he attempts to become the first person to ever free solo climb Yosemite’s 3,000 foot high El Capitan wall. With no ropes or safety gear, this would arguably be the greatest feat in rock climbing history. Alex Honnold is the obvious center of gravity, but Tommy Caldwell, Jimmy Chin, Sanni McCandless give the film the texture it needs to feel like more than a single-subject profile.

The reason people keep recommending Free Solo usually has less to do with the plot and more to do with what it’s actually about. There’s a clear preoccupation with california here, and it’s paired with el capitan in a way that gives the whole thing more staying power than a plot summary suggests. You can also feel free climbing and mountain working in the background, quietly shaping how later scenes land even when they’re not the explicit focus.

The adventure and documentary classification undersells it a little. Free Solo uses those elements as a foundation, then builds something more particular on top — a film that’s easy to categorize and a little harder to fully predict.

What Jimmy Chin gets right here is restraint: knowing when to let a scene breathe and when to move on, a skill that separates competent adventure filmmaking from the kind people actually remember. It also helps that Jimmy Chin, Sanni McCandless, Mikey Schaefer are given real material to work with; none of them feel like they’re just there to round out a call sheet.

At 100 minutes, it never overstays its welcome, moving with a confidence that a lot of longer films could learn from. National Geographic Documentary Films, Little Monster Films, Itinerant Media, Parkes+MacDonald Image Nation produced the film, and the polish shows in every frame. The film went on to gross $21,790,193 worldwide, a strong showing for an adventure title.

If you’re the kind of viewer who gravitates toward adventure films with something on their mind, Free Solo earns a spot on the list. Free Solo remains a reliable answer to the question of what the adventure genre can do when everyone involved is actually trying. It’s a detail easy to miss on a first viewing of Free Solo, but it rewards anyone paying close attention. That kind of craftsmanship is easy to take for granted until you watch a lesser film try the same thing and fail. Little touches like that are why the film keeps finding new defenders long after its initial release. It’s the sort of small decision that separates a good adventure film from a merely competent one. None of it feels accidental — Free Solo is the product of choices made with real intention, and it plays that way from start to finish. That’s ultimately the difference between a film people watch once and one they keep coming back to, and Free Solo lands closer to the latter.