Fall is on Netflix now.
Thought the trailer looked fun but 5 minutes in, the climbing scenes are getting me fuming.
Do you know where the b67 tower is?
you see that light up there!
the dialogue is nearly as realistic as the climbing
Oh no. The top climbers are foiled by a locked 4ft high gate.
They’re on the 2000ft high mast.
it seems to be anchored by one small panel held loosely by some dirt.
the rope’s disappeared.
No, it’s back. But not sure what the rope is for. Nothing’s getting clipped in.
This tower seems to be held together by sellotape
Being roped up isn’t giving Connor much confidence.
I mean, it’s still not doing anything so not surprised really.
the exposure does look pretty intense. They’ve really captured that out-there, Stanage summit vibe.
That drone is trouble.
We’ll they made the summit. All’s good eh?!
remember girls, the summit’s optional; getting down is mandatory.
if the descent goes as smoothly as the ascent, this will be a pretty short movie.
I’m reassured now they’ve clipped back into the meaningless rope ready to go down.
Ooh. That ladder doesn’t look good.
but at least they’re roped up so they could ab past it or something.
No. Much better to rely on catching a fall with your bare hands and then hauling back up while holding onto a mast with the other hand.
Ooh, a lot of ladder seems to be missing
Come on, at least tie yourself round the top antenna or something while you wait.
If it's shit, stop watching it.
Why are you allowing your limited time on this planet to be wasted by others?
Had a pee without removing harness. Good work.
although managed to land it on her own bag. Not so good work.
I’ve wasted time on worse things
Rob, the characters are saying the same thing. The irony of them talking about life being short and me wasting it watching them.
they didn’t sign up to text 999 service. That would probably have worked in this scenario.
they’re definitely dropping the phone
Who’d have thought the egg drop would be practice for a real life or death situation.
Dog man failed to notice shoe falling from sky.
her phone battery is holding up well.
Don’t forget your prussic
Oops. Nodded off. Did I miss anything?
oh good they’ve been rescued.
wait, there’s only one of them.
I think the main message is take a 60m rope.
and use it.
It's a b movie classic!
> wait, there’s only one of them.
Yeah: turns out there's a reason the drag-your-buddy-up-hand-over-hand part looked so implausible. (Whether that was the film makers' intent ot just a happy coincidence, I cannot say - it is a *dreadful* movie)
cleverer than I realised
Are you drunk? You've just had a rather long conversation with yourself on an open forum.
> I had a brief chat with Rob.
Fair.
I'm going to watch the film. You've convinced me.
sorry for the spoilers
it's almost inspired me to go climb some scaffolding! 🤣
Damn. Disappointed now to find this is not a thread about a movie based on the story of all the musicians sacked by Mark E Smith.
> It's a b movie classic!
I love a good B movie. Once the Mrs has finished Coro it's on. As long as it's not another shitty American climbing film where the egos are bigger than Olympus Mons and they're all trying to kill each other to impress the girlies!
If it hasn't got an unravelling harness and a bloke randomly bolting stuff it just doesn't feel real to me
Is there some esoteric US method of climbing in that first climbing scene where Dan falls. I mean, no-one is belaying but they are placing gear....?
Anyway no sun block...
> I mean, no-one is belaying but they are placing gear....?
The rope and gear are just there as a mental security blanket.
In all fairness, at least they are tied together and actually clipped into something meaning it's not certain death if one falls.
Later when climbing the tower the rope serves no purpose all the way up.
What amazes me is this film cost $3 million to make. A pretty significant sum of money was spent (granted, small in the film making industry, but not small otherwise) and they didn't even bother to get a climbing consultant. Or they did and ignored him.
They literally could have walked into any climbing club, and paid anybody who's got some outdoor experience $200 for 2 hours of their time to review the plot and provide feedback and it would have ended up being a not too bad film. Why wouldn't they do this?
I get the impression they walking into a climbing shop, had a look at what gear they sold, bought some of and just guessed how to use it.
$3m is a very small budget for a film.
Anyways, how would people have got down once the ladder fell? There must be a way with the gear they have, even if it was risky.
(Only watched the trailer)
> $3m is a very small budget for a film.
I know, but they could surely stretch an extra $200.
> Anyways, how would people have got down once the ladder fell?
I wondered if it would be possible in the the same manner that you can climb coconut trees. Rope tied between your legs, and rope swung around with grab handles. Opposing forces create the friction needed.
There would be no protection so scary as hell, and a possibility that the structure would be too slippy, but I think it would work.
They had 50ft of rope so could have tested it tied in for the first 25ft.
I saw a review of this and the reviewer, who clearly knew nothing of climbing, was greatly taken with the exposure and tension. I then forgot the name, until this thread came along. I since seem to have mislaid pieces of half an hour of my life.
Abbing from the ladder brackets would have been an option, and then they could have had shoe-lace threads snapping thread-by-thread as they are wont to do (much as pockets apparently progressively crumble under load). Or maybe they did do that during the parts of my life that were not sacrificed to the film. I wonder how long Netflix will keep on asking me if i want to resume watching.
I guess they could have taken the rope apart and abseiled on bits of the core strands tied together, eek! (once they'd understood the concept of abseiling )
Or here's a fun one. Tie the rope around the tower with a bit of slack, tie into the rope. Launch from the top at a tangent with a good bit of speed and hope you're enough of a fly-wheel to spiral your way down the tower. Don't try at home kids!
I agree that the lack of consultancy is a complete joke. It's a bit like making a film about football where the keeper defends the net with a cricket bat whilst wearing a swim cap. They are made out to be experienced big wall climbers (with some reference to Yosemite route names) and yet they have absolutely no concept of anchors, runners, belaying, abseiling or even any point of the rope in the first place. At least all this made it amusing!
Maybe if one of them had been evil and quick thinking enough they'd have realised that if they'd shoved their live friend off, they could have easily alerted the dog walker on the way down
Can I request more blow-by-blow movie reviews please.. this is good stuff..
youtube.com/watch?v=eM-EEPI4hoc&
Apparently one strand of a climbing rope can take 105lb static load. And there's a few dozen of them in a rope.
Seems easy enough to double or triple the the length of a rope, if all you're going to do is lower someone down on it very slowly.
> Apparently one strand of a climbing rope can take 105lb static load.
Handy info to remember.
By my back of a beer mat calcs, if you were brave enough to go for a single core strand and you could somehow protect from abrasion, with a 12 stranded rope, you could probably get down from a 610m mast in one if you had at least 50m rope to untwine and some mighty good luck. You'd get a lot of rope (string) stretch! Not volunteering to test that however!
Sounds like a Chris Tan Death Product to me.
Hear hear!
Hahaha, some people do over analyse things! (escape solutions above)
Accept it for what it is, I didn't feel I wasted two hours of my life, quite enjoyed it.
When I watched it, my thought had been that they could have used the rope like a tree climbing strap. They have spare carabiners (they never tie directly onto their harnesses, they are always attached using a carabiner so they have at least two spare if they actually know how to tie in, which is debatable), so potentially they could use a carabiner and a short length of rope to hang under the ledge to set everything up (you wouldn't be able to set it up above the ledge), then they could wrap a length or preferably two around the tower with one end tied to one harness, and then the other tied to the other, then they could use the other carabiner to attach the rope together where they are tied in (just loose on the rope above the knot) . The force of their weight pulling through the carabiner would probably provide enough friction on the rope against the tower to allow them to shimmy down (although they're going to end up pressed together and it's going to be pretty uncomfortable) and if they've got the rope length right, there should be enough of a gap to get over the ladder brackets as they go. Getting around the dishes a below them will be sketchy, but the same method would work there too.
Of course I have absolutely no idea whether this would work in practice, but in my mind it sounds like a possible solution and in some ways less sketchy then dangling on individual core strands!!
ok here's another sketchy solution. Tie the rope around the tower, loose enough to slide down but tight enough to catch on any protrusions. Tie on to the other end, put your big boy pants on, jump. If you survive the whipper of your life, unsnag the rope, rinse repeat. Eek!
I thought:
Lure vulture onto platform
Grab its feet.
Use it to fly / spiral down to the ground
Terrible film,obviously no climbing advisers used in its making
I haven't seen it but ... could they not use what rope thy had to prusik down? Wouldn't be much of a film, mind.
I thoroughly enjoyed your blow by blow film commentary! Most entertaining, thank you 😊
I have just finished watching the movie and found it was clearly, frustratingly, maddeningly blind to any knowledge of climbing technique whatsoever. Yet it still managed to be edge of the seat stuff. So not a complete waste of time.
Beat me to it! Allthough some of the escape options in this thread sound like excellent fun surely it would be both safe and pretty hassle free to just cut the rope into a couple of meter lengths and simply prusik down the tower? I'm pretty sure I did actually did somthing similar once in my misspent youth.
Would prusiking on something so large work? I need to find a massive pole/tower thing to check.
With rope on rope, there's a sweet spot on the ratios of diameter.
No idea if this translates to rope on a metal tower however.
I haven't actually seen the film so cant comment but I've done it on a lamppost with tape slings. With a rope I guess youd just need to increase the amount of turns.
Their rope was 16.6 metres long. Tower possibly just under 1 metre diameter. Call it 80 cm. That's a 5m circumference. Three wraps for your Prusik and now you just have 1.6m left to play with.
Hmm, well I shall change my response from 'safe' to 'not immediately deadly', I rekon it's got legs though....
I still think my coconut tree climbing technique would be the way to go provided I don't go first.
The main problem I guess wasn't getting all the way down the tower, but to get down as far as the wider section with the internal ladder. I daresay that would have been possible with the limited equipment but I think their intelligence was probably the real limiting factor
The real limiting factor is that any practical solutions wouldn't have been as interesting to watch.
You can only assume that is the case. It seems incredible that no-one who knows a single thing about climbing was asked to advise in any way.
Your drunk thought monologue was my favourite thread this hour
> could they not use what rope thy had to prusik down?
I've not seen it, but wouldn't there be remnants of the broken external ladder still sticking out from the tower at intervals? Wouldn't they get in the way of your prussic?
God that was awful (for all the reasons above!)
Just watched film. Same thoughts as you all but also really enjoyed this thread as an epilogue so many thanks all.
Apparently they have started making Fall 2. I'll looks forward to the Fall 2 thread
Really needs to be called 'Fell'.
Finally finished watching it after the second sitting …
there was actually a climbing consultant on it!
In reply to ricardo0:
I've just seen a film on Netflix called "The Ledge".
I think it's the next one I'll review
Well you never know, they might incorporate some of our daft solutions into the sequel I look forward to my cheque in the post!
> Really needs to be called 'Fell'.
I keep thinking this thread is going to be about a Mark E Smith biopic.
watch party tonight?
Sooooo much negativity.
Absolutely brilliant B movie for a Friday night. Thanks for drawing it to my attention.
Watched it last night.
Bright side? I now realise what an absolute classic Cliffhanger is.
> Fall is on Netflix now.
> Thought the trailer looked fun but 5 minutes in, the climbing scenes are getting me fuming.
Ha! I got to four minutes before pausing! Very odd whatever they're supposed to be doing.
In one of the later seasons of Fear the Walking Dead, there is an equally ridiculous extended climbing scene. They always seem to end up moving together with no runners between them. It's comical.