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“Big waves aren’t measured in feet, but in elements of fear” – so said Buzzy Trent of the killer crush of Waimea Bay in 1963. If that’s true, some of the people featured in this film must have hit a 9.3 on the fear Richter scale. Faced with walls of water converging on themselves with a force of many tons, only a few feet above a razor sharp coral reef, these guys look Death square in the face, smirk, and punch his lights out. They’re freaking nutbars. They’re truly and undeniably insane. And there should be more of it.

Geez, I really am sounding like “Easy” Earl Dittman now, but to hell with it. It’s not often a film festival like Sundance will open with a surfing movie. In fact, it’s never happened before. The decision to show the opening night festival crowd a film that wouldn’t normally play outside of a small, mostly male, mostly coastal demographic certainly wouldn’t have come easily. After all, the Sundance crowd isn’t just made up of celebrities and film freaks – there are also old folks, skiers who happened to be in town when they realized there as a festival on, and the locals, who likely haven’t dipped their toe in the ocean since mom and dad took them to Disneyworld fifteen years ago. In essence, this is a crowd ready-made to put crap on a film like this if it didn’t present them with an epic vision, stunning cinematography, interesting historical background, and the kind of flow that you’d expect from a seasoned documentarian. But if the reaction from those outside this screening is anything to go by, the experiment was a runaway success.

Surfing started out as a pastime for the Hawaiians about a hundred years ago, only for the missionaries to come along and ban it because it involved not a lot of clothing and the occasional mixing of the sexes. Jesus, I hate missionaries. But in the early part of the 20th century it started to pick up again, mostly as a tool to bring in tourists to the Hawaiian islands. That’s when Riding Giants gets interesting, as the film documents a hardcore group of 1950’s white boys who made their way to the islands and played an early version of Survivor. They scrounged food out of the forest, crammed ten people to a hut, and did nothing all day, every day, but surf. As these 20 or so kids grew to more, and more, they began to discover parts of Hawaii with bigger waves, and slowly but surely began to dare themselves to take the waves on. This early surf commune is documented with loads of archival footage, not just of the action in the waves, but also on the beach, hamming it up and generally being all rebellious – in that ever so non-rebellious 1950’s way, of course.

Through the years, bigger waves would be discovered, each one being tackled by one brave, crazy, nigh suicidal individual as all around him would expect the worst. And sometimes the worst happened, with death in injury a relatively common theme throughout the years whenever these guys tried to tackle a wave that had never been tackled. Riding Giants follows this progression, documenting the riding of each massive wave like Ken Burns may document those who climbed the highest mountains; only without the terrible haircut and self-important sales pitch.

To Peralta’s credit, he knows exactly when to keep the images moving through tricky editing and camerawork, and when to back the hell away, show us the pictures and let the sheer force of nature do the talking. Borrowing from the groundbreaking quasi-animation technique used to make still photos come alive in The Kid Stays in the Picture, Peralta keeps things moving along nicely when other docos might have been standing still, keeping the talking head sequences short and punchy, while embracing the humor and enthusiasm of her interview subjects.

I could quack on and on about this flick and you’re not going to understand how good it is, so instead I’ll simply say this. Riding Giants may not be the greatest documentary of our time, but it is a film that I guarantee will freak you out more than once, while giving you some small insight into why these guys toss away what we would call ‘lives’ to sit on a beach, soak up sun and throw themselves of skyscrapers of water. It’s The Alchemist for surfers. It’s Winged Migration for beach bums. It’s Rudy in the water. It’s a must-see.

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originally posted: 01/16/04 00:08:52
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