Skyscraper Live

The Vertigo of Spectacle

If *Free Solo* was a meditation on the sublime silence of nature, *Skyscraper Live* is its jarring, neon-soaked inverse: a cacophony of commerce, adrenaline, and uncomfortable voyeurism. Directed by Joe DeMaio, this Netflix live event—ostensibly an adventure film, but functionally a high-wire circus act—strips Alex Honnold of the granite cathedral of El Capitan and places him against the slick, postmodern facade of Taipei 101. The result is a viewing experience that is technically dazzling, deeply anxiety-inducing, and ethically murky.

The premise is simple enough to fit on a billboard: Honnold, the world’s most famous climber, ascending 508 meters of glass and steel without a rope, live. But the context shifts the emotional frequency entirely. Where his Yosemite climbs felt like private spiritual communions that we were privileged to witness, *Skyscraper Live* feels like a gladiatorial game played for subscriber retention. The framing is less about the purity of human movement and more about the "will-he-won't-he" tension of a potential televised tragedy.



Visually, DeMaio captures the terrifying scale of Taipei 101 with predatory precision. The camera drones buzz around Honnold like mechanical gnats, emphasizing the sheer verticality of the "bamboo box" sections—the flared, pagoda-style tiers that required Honnold to perform complex overhang maneuvers thousands of feet above the pavement. The cinematography is slick, perhaps too slick. The high-definition gloss creates a sense of unreality, making the danger feel simultaneously immediate and distant, like a video game cutscene rendered in 8K.

However, the most arresting visual motif wasn't the drop, but the glass. Unlike the indifference of a rock face, the building is alive. One of the film's most surreal and haunting qualities is the sight of office workers and onlookers pressing their faces against the interior windows, inches from Honnold’s chalk-dusted fingers. It creates a suffocating intimacy; he is not alone in the void, but is instead a specimen in a jar, observed by the very people whose daily grind he is physically transcending. This juxtaposition—the man courting death separated by a pane of glass from the man filing a spreadsheet—is the film’s most potent artistic statement.

The "Heart" of the piece remains Honnold himself, who operates with a Zen-like detachment that creates a bizarre friction with the hysterical packaging of the broadcast. While the commentary team (including a breathless Elle Duncan and Mark Rober) works overtime to manufacture urgency, filling every silence with stats and speculation, Honnold is practically meditative, reportedly listening to a playlist of rock music to keep his pacing. He treats the climb not as a stunt, but as a puzzle.

This disconnect is where the film falters as a narrative. The production desperately wants this to be a sporting event, complete with countdowns and stats, but climbing is an internal art. The intrusion of the "live" format—the interviews with his wife, Sanni McCandless, the cutaways to the studio—felt like an intrusion on a sacred act. We are forced to confront our own complicity: are we watching for the triumph of the human spirit, or are we rubbernecking at the edge of the abyss?

Ultimately, *Skyscraper Live* is a testament to physical genius trapped inside a commercial machine. It lacks the soulful resonance of Honnold’s documentary work, trading the poetry of the mountains for the vertigo of the metropolis. It is a spectacle in the truest sense—impossible to look away from, yet leaving a lingering sense of unease about what, exactly, we just consumed.