Speed rock climbing is the latest wrinkle in the growing pantheon of extreme sports; high-speed climbers take the basic rudiments of mountain climbing and shift them into overdrive, climbing sheer cliffs in a matter of hours rather than days. Filmmaker Pepe Danquart offers a look at this exciting new sport and two of its best-known proponents in the documentary To the Limit. Alexander Huber and his brother Thomas Huber are profiled as they demonstrate their skills in the mountains of Patagonia
and set out to climb El Capitan, a mountain in Yosemite National Park over 3,000 feet high, in a furious 150 minutes, a notion Alexander jokingly describes as "an assault against common sense." While featuring dazzling footage of the Huber brothers in action, To the Limit also offers an insight on the rivalry between the siblings and their passionate need to confront fellow climbers as well as nature itself. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Director Pepe Danquart and his cinematographers give us lots of splendid mountainscapes, but more importantly, they put the cameras right there with the climbers; we see, up close, every strained muscle and grimace.
In To the Limit, Thomas and Alexander Huber run up rocks the way some of us run up credit cards -- rapidly, fearlessly and with little regard for consequences.
Many American sports documentaries tend to fall into a predictable inspirational rut, no matter how stunning the footage. Pepe Danquart's To the Limit from Germany looks great, but it's an altogether different animal.
So nerve-racking is its death-defying rock climbing footage that To the Limit could have easily been renamed Vertigo without giving the master of suspense any postmortem unease.
There is more to To The Limit than just pretty pictures. The movie is both a study in human endurance and a sketch of two men whose fraternal love sometimes curdles into disgust.
The action shots are often breathtaking, but overbearing mood music, shaky-cam and other would-be enhancements leave you wishing To the Limit had escaped postproduction meddling.
Danquart chose to omit all maps, charts, graphics and identifying captions, a decision that severely restricts To the Limit's appeal for non-aficionados.
This documentary follows two Bavarian brothers on their climbing trips around the world and particularly their biggest challenge: to climb a peak in Yosemite Park that usually takes 5 days in 2 and a half hours. The landscape shots are stunningly beautiful, the soundtrack nice, the climbing scenes dizzying and
spectacular. Their final attempt to tackle the speed climb record is exciting and exhausting to watch. Sadly, the middle part of the film is somewhat slow with too much personal talking going on. That said, the cinematography is so fantastic that many scenes of this will probably be hard to forget. Worth checking out.
This is definitely one IMax movie that will
take your breath away and leave you in awe.
I saw it at the Fleet museum in San Diego where the dome theater is one of the best anywhere.
Truly an awesome experience.
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