The Soloist review: pretty, but lacking visceral oomph

Vertiginous! Hair-raising! Gasp-inducing! This was what I was expecting from The Soloist, a near feature-length 360 video about rock climber Alex Honnold, who made a name for himself by ascending some of the world’s most imposing cliffs without any ropes or harnesses (this is called going “free-solo.” Perhaps also: “insanity”). But instead I found the experience rather staid and uninvigorating, the sheer stillness of its compositions sucking the life out of what might’ve been a jaw-dropping spectacle. 

Don’t get me wrong: visions of Honnold clutching onto the side of a mountain, high up and harness-free, one slip up from certain oblivion, always impresses to some extent. Not just for their death-defying allure but the nature of the compositions themselves, pairing the majesty of ancient rock formations with one of us piddly, pipsqueak, short-living humans, in this instance holding on for dear life—but making it all look perfectly easy.

Honnold was the first person to free-solo to the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, an achievement explored in the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary Free Solo. One of the first immersions in The Soloist depicts the subject in the thick of it: ridiculously high on a Nevada mountain, not climbing up but across a platform-like chunk of it, hands upwards and back facing the ground, looking like Spider-Man. Cripes, this guy is bold.

Director Renan Ozturk then cuts to Honnold’s home, where he mingles with his pregnant wife in the kitchen before a journalist arrives to interview him about climbing and the upcoming birth of his child. It’s not a “real” interview: both participants are obviously acting, which makes it feel forced and hokey. This becomes a framing device that anchors the rest of the experience, though there were many ways this story could’ve been framed; using a fake interview was a bad and bizarre choice.

The Soloist doesn’t really a story per se—it’s more like a series of climbs. Honnold travels to Europe with his friend, Swiss climber Nicolas Hojak, the pair having their eyes on various “wow, mumma!” sites including locations in the Italian Dolomites. At one point there’s an awkwardly staged “fancy seeing you here!” type moment high up on a summit that comes across, like the framing device, as forced and stilted; it’s hard to imagine that someone didn’t cringe while looking at this in the editing room.

The Soloist belongs to a lineage of 360 videos that place the camera in a central position and avoid movements and close-ups. Partly in fear of inducing nausea, and partly to embrace the idea of the viewer determining where to look themselves rather than having the visual terms dictated. 

There’s an additional logic to keeping the camera still in The Soloist—and it’s that Honnold is the real special effect, the real performer. Therefore one could argue it’s the camera’s job to simply capture him. Which is OK for a few minutes of “gee whiz, he’s high up!” but this production—originally split into multiple chapters—has a lot of fat on the bone, clocking in at a chunky 59 minutes. It’s a slog to get through; it needed some punch and pizzazz. 

Part of the problem is that we don’t really share the journey of climbing with Honnold. It’s not like he ascends the mountains while attached to a 360 camera, which might’ve packed more visceral impact, bringing us up there with him. Maybe this wasn’t possible due to logistical and/or safety reasons, but the underlying point remains: we experience the height, not the climb. 

The gimmicky carnival-like game Richie’s Plank Experience is famous for having players walk across a plank from a gasp-inducing height, way up in a virtual skyscraper. But it also wisely simulated the elevator ride to the top of the building, understanding of the power of arriving at a space. If The Soloist had been more visually engaging, I might not have thought about this, and just savored the sights. Sadly that wasn’t the case. Some of the visuals are lovely, but there were times when I wanted to grab the camera and shake it—to inject the experience with a bit of energy and life.