Alex Honnold Breaks Down Climbing Scenes From Movies & TV | GQ Sports

you afraid of heights cooper hardly a fear of heights is illogical fear of falling on the other hand is prudent and evolutionary the vast majority of people who say that they have a fear of heights aren't actually afraid of being up high but when they're standing on the edge of a cliff they're deeply afraid and that makes sense because they're afraid of falling off the cliff and dying which is totally appropriate i'm afraid of dying too like if i thought i was gonna fall off a cliff i would find that very scary the key is to make sure you don't fall off hey gq i'm alex honold welcome back for part two where i'll be talking about some more climbing clips this is the breakdown [Music] first up the iger sanction maya doesn't give a rat's ass about anything except climbing the air sanction is probably the most realistic hollywood depiction ever maybe the iger is a really famous mountain in switzerland this is all part of the sort of training montage where clint eastwood gets into shape to go climb the eiger and so he refines his rock climbing skills on these desert towers and then takes it to the alps what clint eastwood is doing in this clip is called chimney and he's basically applying counter pressure to the two different walls of this big tower and i'm not sure exactly what he's climbing in this but it is a really cool man-sized chimney i'm sure they looked around quite a bit to find something that would sort of highlight this technique really nicely chimneying really depends upon friction between your hands and your feet i mean basically just how much outward pressure you can exert on the different walls of the chimney and the challenge of it is that each time you move one of your limbs like if you want to move one foot up you have to put extra pressure on your hands so you can unweight the one foot and then put more weight on the feet again so you can move the hands basically you just have to balance back and forth as you sort of x your way up when you know how to do it it's actually a very secure style of climbing because the harder you push the safer you feel basically you have the fitness for it you can push yourself in there and definitely and feel really safe in this particular clip it's a little bit confusing because he's above the other climber so he's like leading but he's actually on top rope the other climber is pulling the rope in to keep him secure as he goes up so it's really sort of unclear as to how they got the rope up there in the first place but that's kind of one of those classic hollywood sort of things where you're like how'd the rope get up who cares they're just up there rock climbing it's pretty realistic otherwise you mean before i got decrepit and weak you didn't look so decrepit and weak yesterday punching out that wrestler anyway this smile is really something he killed a guy once all right pause it this is awesome this looks great it's realistic he's climbing well i mean it's maybe slightly showy the way he's kind of moving like a frog i feel like if you were that far above a gear you'd maybe be slightly more conservative in your movements just to be safe but i mean this is totally legit it looks amazing like this is real climbing and for a hollywood film that's cool listen john if you got to rope yourself to anybody on that hill you make damn sure it's meyer this is interesting and it looks really cool i'm not totally sure what's going on because there's already a rope hanging off the one tower and he just jumped from the other tower so it's a little bit confusing as to why they would have already rigged a rope up one of the towers but climbed the other one and then jumped back across [Music] okay so this is a bit of a cut from what they were just doing i mean you can see that these are different towers in a different place slightly different types of rock i mean this is still sandstone but it's different than we were just looking at now he's doing what's called a tyrollian like sliding across a rope from one formation to another made most famous from the clip in cliffhanger where somebody falls to their depth doing this but this is a totally legitimate climbing technique and i mean this is all pre-cgi so i assume this is clint eastwood dangling across this rope which is pretty cool normally he would be dangling from a slightly shorter leash so that he could put his feet up onto the rope and then kind of hand over hand like a spider a little faster but he's also got kind of a heavy looking backpack on so presumably that's pulling him backwards so it probably is kind of hard work to stay upright normally to do a tie rolling you have to fix your rope on one end and then climb up to the other end and then you can fix the rope between those two points then kind of slide back in this case they're not showing enough to really show how they got either end of the rope attached in place but you're kind of like oh they're a training camp you know he's just up there practicing climbing skills and having a good time it's like maybe somebody else fixed the rope in place like who knows the other thing going on in this clip is that he seems to have a backup line clipped into him which intuitively makes sense to have something to back you up just in case but in this case it's not really clear what it would do because if the main white rope that he's hanging from broke it's like yeah he's clipped into this other rope but he's going to take this horrendously long swinging fall back into the cliff that he came from so it's not really making him any safer it's just going to make it easier for them to haul his body back up or something either way he's going to be catastrophically injured if the white rope breaks i kind of think that the backup rope in this particular shot is there more to add drama to it basically to have more things just like hanging and dangling in space because it looks crazier [Music] again this looks good i mean he's repelling nicely he's moving nicely the view is incredible everything about this is kind of awesome i mean they chose this improbable looking wall it's like hard to imagine how you would repel down this but it looks amazing and he's doing it well the thing about repelling is that you have a fixed anchor at the top say like a piece of climbing equipment with like a chain link or something and then you run your rope through the link and so you have both strands of the rope coming down and so you're holding on to both strands and when you get to the bottom you can just pull one strand and the other strand goes up through the anchor and comes back down to you so you do have to leave something behind as the actual anchor point but the rope comes down every time you pull it which is what he's doing and it all looks good hey why don't we just call it a climb the way it is and take the escalator down i'm pretty sure this is on navajo lands in monument valley they got permission to climb the totem pole which is one of the most iconic towers in the desert it's really hard to get permission but you know for clint eastwood it happens it's all a little bit weird because they were climbing and then tie rolling and then repelling and now they're climbing a tower again but again it's like in the spirit of a training montage you're like this is great and this is kind of old school the way he's hammering a piton into the sandstone crack like this but for the day and for the technology that is available this is totally realistic nowadays we use different equipment but this was fine then [Music] it's kind of classic that they're cropping his head out in the shot because almost surely this is like a real climber doing this because the piton work looks good and then the shot where it showed clint eastwood's rack like all the carabiners and ketones hanging off of it that predates when i started climbing so i've actually never climbed with that type of equipment but i think that's a pretty realistic depiction of the sort of rack that somebody would carry i mean for a sandstone tower it seems like maybe he wouldn't need quite that much but certainly when you see pictures of the first sense of lcap and things like that that's exactly the organizational system that people are using okay give me some slides so i think one of the things that i've always really liked about the iger sanction is that it shows the proper struggle he's having a hard time he's having a hard time getting his feet in he's like fumbling around with things his partner looks like he's never climbed before but like this is what a day out looks like basically it's not like the speed isn't turned up like a lot of hollywood depictions are climbing everything happens faster because it has to fit into this little movie this is like a nice slowly drawn out like this is a day of climbing [Music] this is called mantling like when you press over the lip of something you know that might not be quite the most graceful mantle i've ever seen because he's about to sort of belly flop slash roll over the lip of this thing but you know it's not bad and he's doing it and it looks good a real climber would probably have just tried to surmount that little bulge more to the left or more to the right basically not gone on the part where his feet had to dangle like that to be fair he is practicing for the iger you know so it's like maybe he is just choosing to do the harder line [Music] one of the coolest things about desert spires like that is that there's such a pinnacle it's like when you pull onto the summit you really get that satisfaction of being on the tippy top of your surroundings like nothing but air around you you see in the summit clip there the clint eastwood pops over and he's like whoa it's like not just the feeling of satisfaction but also the feeling of fatigue you know like he finally finished doing this really hard thing that you're trying to do and then you get to sit there and be like oh so amazing you know now we just have to go down actually interesting thing with that particular summit is that there wasn't any kind of clear anchor for him on the top there so it's not really clear how they're going to get back down afterward maybe on one side of that summit there's some kind of fixed anchor yeah i don't know how they're going to get off that but you know they're interrupted mountaineers they'll figure something out next up we have mission impossible ghost protocol i feel very confident in saying that there are no such thing as magnetic climbing glove things there are things like suction cups and stuff that people do use on the sides of buildings where you can like crank it and it suctions on and then you can uncrank it but i think they're slow and laborious and they're not something that you would ever use to just solo a building okay so he's climbing up the outside of the burj khalifa which is the tallest building in the world i've actually scouted the outside of the burj khalifa a couple times for a potential tv thing so i've rappelled down the outside of this building and climbed it the experience that he's having right there where all you see is yourself and the exposure behind you actually is incredibly unnerving because instead of being like oh i'm climbing all you see is the 2000 foot drop behind you this is all totally realistic it is like mirrored glass and it's crazy because dubai has something like 50 of the tallest buildings in the world but the burj is so much taller than all the other buildings around that they look like little toys below you and you're like those are some of the tallest buildings in the world it's like totally insane it's not that unusual to encounter weather issues when you're climbing i think in this case having a giant sandstorm come in probably reflects the failure of planning because if the sandstorm is that big obviously it shows up on the weather forecast so it's not like it just sneaks up on you in this case he probably should have looked at the weather before he started resolving the outside of the building but weather is such an important part of climbing you're always looking at the temperature and thinking about whether or not you'll be in the sun versus the shade thinking about whether or not you'll get wet from rain or not yeah i mean you think about weather all the time that's a long way off it's a little weird because having the magnetic thing on his glove come off it wouldn't like shoot him off like that i mean it would just stop sticking this is actually a sort of legit technique actually i mean this is the way i climb the burj basically i mean so his hands are sticking to the wall which is unrealistic but the way he's pushing his feet is counter pressure between the two beams is totally realistic and those little chrome fins that stick out those really shiny metal things on the sides of him the way i was climbing the burj was that i could span tip from tip i could basically pinch one of the chrome beams on one side and then hold my fingertips like behind the other side of it and then kick my feet the way he's doing and the technique is pretty close actually and then you see right above him as that little tiny metal lip the technique for climbing the birds is like you hold the two beams you move twice you catch the down pulling little metal lift right above them and then you do three moves on the little lip and then back to pinching the chrome beams it's actually quite a hard sequence for climbers out there i thought it was like b4ish but the thing is it's 112 floors until you get a break so you do the same v4 boulder problem 112 times in a row it's incredibly pumpy it makes you very very fatigued he doesn't get tired though because he's tom cruise that's like a little comedy scene to add some levity of like oh his thing got stuck but that's actually not that uncommon like i've been on the side of all cap and had my hat blow away and you're like oh my hat and then you see it drift away above you and then you see like land on a ledge out to the side and you're like huh because there are updrafts up the side of the building the way he's chimneying in this he's kind of counter pressuring because he's back on one side and his foot on the other that is a legitimate climbing technique in this case on the burj it doesn't work because the little chrome fins that he's pushing against one they slope away from him and two the dimensions don't really work like they're too small like his back is too big to push against evenly basically it'd be like a tiny fraction of the shoulder blade and a tiny part of one foot there's too much of the rest of his body like pulling him outward as someone who tried to do this i can tell you it doesn't work but it looks great and it is like a realistic principle [Music] i feel like he may have broken the window if he came into it that hard but you know it's hard to say [Music] he looks kind of comfortable standing there for a second and that actually is somewhat realistic because the thing about buildings is that they're perfectly vertical so anytime you get a little foothold you basically can't stand over your foothold and kind of relax even though it's very difficult climbing and it's this crazy position there are definitely moments where if you have a foothold that's an inch and a half wide that's pretty good to be able to lean in and relax quite a bit though what it looks like he's about to do is obviously less relaxing i love mission impossible i love this clip i love the burj khalifa i think this looks amazing i mean yeah the climbing gloves totally unrealistic this couldn't literally happen but the movements that he's using and the way he moves on the wall is realistic enough if gloves like that did exist then this clip would be great next up we have wonder woman there's a bit to get into here i mean it's kind of hard to judge superhero climbing because you can jump 150 feet or whatever she just did to get to the wall presumably you're gonna climb in a totally different way you know if you can do 150 foot jumps i think you're fine you know she can just climb however she wants she makes this huge jump she catches this ledge looks cool she looks all content with herself the look on her face of like i'm just hanging here from one hand isn't this cool i was like i'm gonna empathize with that like that's cool [Music] a week ago i broke a hole very similarly to that and tumbled down this gully i mean technically i was kind of hiking scrambling up this mountainside near my home and so it wasn't like strictly rock climbing but i like broke this hold off really unexpectedly hit my face against the wall which is like just healed i guess though slightly weird i broke my nose and then tumbled down this thing and got super banged up and then sat there for a while and was like oh i guess i'm not technically injured and then carried on up the peak but yeah i mean it happens i mean things break for sure that's like one of the biggest risks in climbing she seems to have just shoved her hand into solid rock and this is where the realism with real climbing sort of disappears because when you just punch your fist into the wall it really changes the need for technique and things i think in the future i'm just gonna try to punch straight into the rock and just climb off my fist we'll see if it works so one arm pull up sick she just punches into the rock makes herself a handhold she's very strong another one on pull-up now she's like not even bothering to hammer she's just putting them straight in funny enough that actually is basically how people ice climb that's totally outrageous but the thing is when you ice climb you hammer your ice tool into the ice and it is totally the same principle as what she was just doing because she was just pulling her hand up and then punching another fist into the rock but that is a fairly similar technique to how people use ice tools like you hit one you pull up on a little bit you hit the other you know it's kind of like you make your own holes as you go i actually love climbing at night i think it's climbing at night you use a bright headlamp so i mean you still see all the holds the same way and sometimes it's actually easier to see some of the holds sometimes the shadows look like little highlights and you can actually tell where little edges are the biggest difference with night climbing is that because you're climbing with a headlamp you have say a 15 foot radius of light around you so you just don't really see the like 2000 foot abyss below you let's say and so in some ways you can get more sort of in the zone because you're like living inside this little bubble of light so you're really focused on just a couple moves above and below you and that's it and there's much less thought about the whole rest of the wall but when you get to the top it's always slightly surreal because you're like what'd we do last night it's a really different experience because you don't see the view the whole time so you're just like did we do anything last night i sure feel tired i feel like i did something it's cool though it's just its own thing next up is captain fantastic i'm not sure exactly what they're climbing on or where they're also cutting wildly between different cliffs and like this suddenly has way more exposure than the last shot where it looked like they were just scrambling close to the ground but i don't know it looks modern they're using normal equipment they have helmets ropes good shoes everything looks safe okay so they're basically three styles of climbing you can either be climbing without a rope which could be bouldering or free soloing or whatever but you're just climbing by yourself on a cliff you could be climbing with a rope on lead which means that you're in the front and you're taking the rope up or you could be climbing on a rope in the second which means that you're top roping top roping is when you're tied into one end of the rope and the rope already goes up and over the top of whatever you're trying to get to you're totally secure the entire time it means that somebody else is pulling the rope in and so the rope is like tight in front of you the whole time that you're climbing okay it just went from zero to 100 in hollywood style in theory when you're top roping if you fall the only distance that you fall is the stretch of the rope which depends on how much rope is out but basically it's not that much if somebody has you on a really tight top rope if you fall you basically don't even move you just sort of sag down onto the rope and you're like oh okay i fell off and then you just grab back on and keep climbing so like in theory top roping is the safest and most casual form of climbing instead he took this like crazy sideways i don't even know what just happened it's a little bit weird because even the fall that they show and he like goes through space you're like okay that looks scary he's falling through space but then to swing back into the wall that hard yeah it's possible but it doesn't really make sense like the physics don't work because if you're like falling cleanly through space you're not just going to hammer back into the wall super hard unless he had started from like a really steep over like it just doesn't totally work you flex your fingers so there's a lot to unpack in the scene this is confusing because the kid a second ago was top roping he just had his rope tied into his harness now he's hanging on a belay device so he's basically rigged as if he's repelling but there's still a rope behind him as if he's top roping so like none of this makes any sense and it's not realistic at all i will say that the whole like hitting the wall and breaking your wrist thing is relatively realistic so i've actually broken my wrist three times through course of my life once falling in the climbing gym twice falling off of like play structures when i was a kid and so it is pretty common to fall off things and break your wrist when you land so i'm like yeah i feel bad for this kid you know stop stay calm think observe and plan if you hit the rocks below you you'll die from flight force trauma okay ignoring what all the kids are yelling at each other i'm like why are there three sets of people climbing on different parts of the wall and why are they all tied into weird things like why is viggo mortisen tied there like a weird spider none of this looks like climbing it's like they've hung dolls to like make the set look nice this all feels like it got like storyboarded you know it's like and then this thing's gonna happen but you're like how does that happen it makes no sense there's no cavalry no one will magically appear and save you in the end the whole idea of oh i just fell and broke my wrist why don't you swing over and keep climbing makes no sense because if you actually broke your wrist you should probably go to the hospital and take care of it yeah there's something to be said for like building toughness in the outdoors but if you broke your arm you should probably treat it you know it's like i think that they're taking the wrong lessons from this whole weird little accident scene all right let's go this is totally insane looking i mean the fist is amazing the scenery spectacular but i think i count seven people on the wall i don't understand who they are or why they're all spread out across the faces typically there are a couple routes up a wall like that and people would be following those specific routes they wouldn't just be like fanned out all over the rock obviously they hired some climbers to sort this out and put all the ropes up and get everybody in position i'm curious which climbers and i wouldn't be surprised if it's people i know in some way because the industry's not that big how they found a section of wall where they were like no one's gonna see this and no one's gonna make fun of us for doing this if you were a real climber and you walked up to the cliff and you saw this going on you'd be like wtf and then you would mercilessly tease whoever was in charge of the rigging for the rest of their life i will say this at least is somewhat realistic everybody looking dejected and cold in the rain because that is one thing about climbing in the northwest is that it rains a lot everybody gets wet everyone gets cold climbing in the outdoors is tough sometimes presumably they should have brought jackets though so overall thoughts on captain fantastic i mean it's a horrendous clip of climbing it makes no sense but i think that overall it's being used as sort of this metaphor for like teaching kids toughness or whatever and i'm like cool you know i'm sure that kid is going to be pretty tough after he broke his wrist and repelled in the rain and then you know it's like who knows what's going on all right next up the big bang theory are you afraid of heights cooper hardly fear of heights is illogical fear of falling on the other hand is prudent and evolutionary that is actually totally true and i say that to people all the time because the vast majority of people who say that they have a fear of heights aren't actually afraid of being up high like if they're in a hotel or like they're riding an elevator if they're an airplane they feel totally fine but it's when they're standing on the edge of a cliff they're deeply afraid and that makes sense because they're afraid of falling off the cliff and dying which is totally appropriate i'm afraid of dying too like if i thought i was gonna fall off a cliff i would find that very scary the key is to make sure you don't fall off climbing indoors is more realistic than people might think obviously climbing indoors is totally different visually and it's like not the cool big mountains and everything but the actual movement of it the way you move your body and the way you use your fingers to hold on to holds and all the rope work like all the techniques everything translates directly you can learn everything you need in a climbing gym and then when you have the opportunity and you take it outside you have all the skill that you need to climb real mountains what would you say is the minimum altitude i need to achieve to cement our newfound friendship come on they have birthday parties here little kids climb this little kids climb those birthday parties my first job was playing birthday kids at a place like this i mean i basically was the person holding the rope there being like come on kids you can do it raise your feet raise your feet you're doing great it's like a whole day of just playing birthday kids harness seems to be secure this is slightly weird because he's got elbow pads knee pads a full body harness and what seems to be a backup rope coming off the back of him don't totally understand and they're climbing incredibly low but this is a comedy so i suppose it's supposed to look totally insane but it looks like he's gonna go off a big bmx jump or something with a body harness on it makes like no sense but here we go so what's your plan koopa well it's not exactly a plan but i think i'm going to pass out that's like a not totally unrealistic depiction of some people's first time climbing now i see why they had the weird backup line so that when he goes into pass out mode they can keep him from hitting his head against the wall which makes sense from a rigging and safety and shooting perspective i've never seen somebody pass out or like faint while climbing indoors but you do see a lot of beginners freeze and actually when i was a kid and i was playing birthday kids all the time you'd get kids that get to the top of the wall and then occasionally you'd basically have to climb up next to them and coach them down or like hold them and help them repel the person belaying lowers you back to the ground it's basically like repelling but you don't have to control yourself you definitely see all kinds of outrageous fear response you know at the climbing gym all right next up we have cliffhanger which is among my favorite films i can't wait this way all right the legend's too far take this rope and pull it apart and tie it together okay so first off he just fired a bolt straight into the rock which sounds cool but sadly doesn't exist climbers even still to this day joke about having a bolt gun which kind of comes from things like this like i wish you had a polka and you could just make yourself safe anytime you shoot into the rock in reality to get bolts into the rock requires like a laborious process of drilling the bolt in we're gonna repel down this rope is 60 years old will it hold don't think so bad answer that's all pretty legit you know 60 year old road will it hold you're like who knows you know because ropes do degrade over time especially really old ropes like that made of hemp and things like pre nylon ropes also the film cliffhanger is supposed to take place in the rockies in the u.s but i know for a fact it was all shot in the dolomites in northern italy that's why this rock is really beautiful limestone walls like really cool spires it's because the dolomites is way more dramatic the american rockies is just like big piles of dirt basically there's nothing like this in the american rockies but you know who cares it looks amazing they were just doing what's called samo repelling where they're each repelling on one strand of the rope conventional repelling is one person goes down both strands and then gets off the rope and then the other person goes down somewhat repelling you have one person on each strand so they're kind of counterweighted so it's a little bit more dangerous totally realistic especially if things are about to explode and you're in the middle of an action movie it definitely makes sense to someone repel because it's just faster okay now swing as hard as you can push okay i take it back that's not realistic i'm not totally sure what they're showing now i'm slightly disappointed for a second i thought that cliffhanger did have one point of realism but it doesn't on closer inspection they're actually both together on one rope which is slightly weird but it makes it more dramatic because it shows the one rope you know sawing back and forth across the rock so it's like obviously the rope's gonna break it's all going to be dramatic they're going to come flying off the rope you also could see that they had repelled almost to the end of the rope so no matter what happens they got to figure something out pretty quick because they're out of ropes the other thing that was deeply unrealistic about this is that you see in this shot that they're dangling way out in space but he was just kind of like running on the wall to get momentum going but if they're dangling out in space there's obviously nothing for him to push against to get a swing going [Music] in this clip they're running back and forth across the wall which does happen in climbing sometimes typically it happens more as you're climbing up a face and you get to a point where like your crack runs out let's say and then you lower back down a little bit and then you do what's called a pendulum where you run back and forth and you make a pendulum shape to like access a different feature or get to a different crack or something and then occasionally if you repel and you find yourself in no man's land and there's nothing near you then you can kind of like run back or forth try to get to somewhere else in this particular case it's pretty unrealistic because they're running like all the way around this mountainside the distance you can run is limited by the length of the rope they're on like 150 piece of rope there's no way they can move more than like 20 feet in either direction because the angles don't work okay i don't even know what's happening here i mean yeah so the repel line was sawing back and forth on the rock that actually is realistic i mean that stuff does happen if you're running back and forth but it's not normally such a chintzy old rope but occasionally ropes do cut like that if they knew that they were going to be repelling to one side or the other they would have just put their repel anchor somewhere else especially because he was using this fake bolt gun he can literally shoot the thing in anywhere rather than rapping down into space and then running back and forth and hoping for the best one of those classic examples where an ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure though to be fair there's a timer going there's a helicopter things are about to explode you know maybe he's a little stressed [Music] okay again this is slightly weirdly unrealistic because the wall was vertical and they were kind of running back and forth and he's like on a vertical part of the wall but then when she's hanging she's hanging out in space which would imply that the wall is undercut below him her body should basically be leaning against the wall as well and she should just scamper right back up to rejoin him but this does make it a lot more dramatic and it highlights sylvester's physique you know let's see him curl this small woman so i haven't actually been around that many giant explosions in the mountains so i'm not totally sure how this is all going to play out but it's very dramatic and they are doing some things on the side of the cliffs that actually might be one of the more realistic things in cliffhangers there are tons of little tucks and folds and cliffs and anytime there's like avalanches or rockfall or like things happening above you it does make sense to sort of tuck yourself into a fold and hunker down and pray for the best that might be the only thing in cliffhanger that's kind of realistic next up we have k2 k2 is the deadliest summit in the himalaya basically much more difficult than everest much more severe actually k2 just got climbed in winter for the first time this winter which was a really big deal for international mountaineering and sort of excitingly it was done by an all nepalese team which is cool because it's their local mountain this clip is some sort of like a training climb not actually climbing k2 because k2 is a huge snowy mountain and in this clip they're basically practiced rock climbing on like a granite spire and that's actually pretty legit like what they're doing in this clip is the type of rock climbing practice that you would do to like learn the rope skills to go to a big mountain like k2 i'm not sure when k2 was made but all the equipment in this is really dated like even though he taped his hand looks kind of old-school he's wearing tights which looks old-school the climbing shoes are quite old-school this is like maybe early 90s or maybe 80s type of gear you mostly judge the age by the colors and the style but you can see that his shoes are like relatively flat i mean in this case his foot is all bent you know against the rock but the type of the shoe is like a relatively flat rigid shoe nowadays for gym climbing and for climbing steep caves you'd be wearing like a much softer more downturn shoe something more shaped like a talent so you can toe in and like pull with your toes but this is all totally appropriate for the time so again the equipment looks super old school and the way he's doing just two carabiners onto the old rigid cam that he put in basically everything about this is old school but looks cool what he's doing in this clip is lead climbing it's totally legit he's going a little bit he's putting in pieces of gear when people say that they go climbing that's what they're talking about [Music] so this is really dramatic and a little over the top when he did that swing he probably could have kept his foot on the back wall because you can see the physical distance isn't so far that his body doesn't span it so in theory he could have like engaged his core and like toed in a little bit and basically kept his foot on and would have saved him having to swing but if he's holding on to like some gigantic hold sometimes it's just joyous to like let go and swing around and have fun so i mean if he's up there having a good time he's like yeah this is all fine and you can actually see that his rope is clipped into gear right below him so he's totally safe as he does this if he's hanging off something that's like super positive then swinging around on it is no problem i'm super curious where this is i kind of want to go climb here i'm also curious who they got to do the climbing because it like looks good if he's moving well climbing nicely like this all looks great it's a little bit of a weird scene with having the four guys hanging in hammocks underneath a ledge there it happens for sure people in hammocks like that was more common in like the 60s and 70s but i think by whatever date this clip was made people had invented portal edges which is like rigid framed flat ledges which are much more comfortable on the other hand i actually just came home from a month-long expedition climbing in the jungle and guyana where we literally stayed in the hammock for a month so yeah people do still use hammocks on the sides of cliffs for sure when that's the most efficient thing like this is probably shot with him laying on the freaking ground and is he wearing gloves or is his hand just like really dirty okay this is starting to get hokier for sure it's a little bit over dramatic like his big jump is stylized of course and it looks a little bit stupid because the wall you can see is low angle so like you can see how his body like drags on the wall basically when he jumps to the thing and because the walls of angle means that he probably could have just raised his foot and pushed off the foot and not had to jump like it doesn't really make sense but it looks awesome i mean i'm into it this is like this is fine i would give this like a solid b for hollywood filming doesn't totally make sense but that's fine thanks for watching these clips with me i really enjoyed breaking down some climbing scenes until next time cheers

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Views: 2,221,968

Rating: 4.9502878 out of 5

Keywords: alex honnold, alex honnold 2021, alex honnold gq, alex honnold gq sports, alex honnold interview, breakdown, breakdown gq sports, climbing scene, climbing scenes, gq, gq alex honnold, gq sports, gq sports alex honnold, k2, mission impossible breakdown, mission impossible climbing building, rock climber, rock climbing, rock climbing movie, rock climbing scene, sports, the breakdown, the breakdown gq sports, wonder woman breakdown

Id: akqcYEIXoEo

Length: 32min 25sec (1945 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/HugoEmbossed]

Tom Cruise climbing the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa? Totally unrealistic. Now when I climbed it...

[u/erik2690]

I really loved the vid of this they did with him like 2 years ago, so was kinda cool to discover a 30 minute new version today. I am a Honnold fanboy, I just find 95% of anything with him talking very engaging.