Alex Honnold Climbs Angola

A travel documentary that happens to have world class climbing in it, and one of the odder chapters in Honnold's career. VICE Sports follows him to Angola, a country a couple of decades out of a twenty-seven-year civil war and holding some of the least touched big rock on the continent. The team also connects with a community clearing land mines left from the conflict, and the film gives that as much room as the walls.

This is for viewers who want an unfamiliar country and unclimbed rock in the same frame. Pablo Durana shoots it, with drone work over terrain almost nobody has filmed, and a local hotel magnate turns out to be part of the story. Skip it if you want Honnold's climbing to be the subject. Here it is the excuse for the trip.

What works is the land mine thread. It is not decoration, and the film treats the people doing that work with more attention than it gives the climbing. What it gets wrong is the climbing. Twenty-eight minutes and I could not tell you what was climbed, how hard, or whether any of it went to the top.

Of Choss and Lions, the Kenya film with Cedar Wright, is the comparison: same continent, same climber, unclimbed rock. That one is a climbing film with jokes. This one is a VICE film with a climber in it. Both are worth it, for different reasons.