An Exercise In Nonsense

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It's a difficult one - the history of snowboarding! A lot has happened over the past 30, actually 40 years, and it's an ambitious task to pack it all into a full feature film.It becomes very clear very soon that the makers didn't have much information on their side. That's why they chose to rather focus on key people than the actual story. Unfortunately this is the moment when it becomes quite distorted - I assume the 1980's had more innovators than just Burton and Sims and I also believe that there have been more influential riders than Terry Kidwell, Shaun Palmer and Craig Kelly. In the first segment though there are some very interesting elements regarding things like halfpipe or early contests.From the 1990's part on the storyline becomes pretty chaotic, switching focus very often without a visible connection. I'm missing a lot of key events and explanations about certain topics - instead the film assumes that the viewer already knows it. It also spends a lot of time just talking about how awesome snowboarding is but can't support the heavy statements with vital background information.On top the production standards are pretty low which doesn't give it that big picture feeling and makes it hard to watch at some points.If it had been called "The history of snowboarders" then it would have gotten 7 stars as it is more a collection of mini biographies than an actual history documentary. But with this premise it rather misses the point. Too bad!

Another attempt of capturing the history of snowboarding? YESSSSS! It can only be better than First Descent, so LET'S GOOOO! I was eagerly waiting for this to come out since I've been riding for almost 25 years and I was so looking forward to getting a summary! I don't know why the Intro revolves so long about Sherman Poppen and the Jake Burton/Tom Sims rivalry, it's definitely worth mentioning but obviously the film team hasn't done much research - at all (basically for this their using only one video for their footage source - just check firstonboard on the web). The actual groundbreaking inventions such as steel edges or high back bindings weren't contributed by neither. After 40 minutes we finally see something else than Jake and Tom working against each other, uhm, nope, Craig and Palmer fight for Jake and Tom so it continues until Sims snowboards goes bankrupt and from now on we're in the (semi) official history of Burton snowboards. I was waiting for so many topics to be covered and elaborated but instead I had to watch Shaun White giving a car to his mother as a present - is this history? In my opinion White hasn't done much for snowboarding but rather himself. Yes, he pushed the competitive level but come on, this is not snowboarding! The film juggles around with topics very loosely, to the point where you lose interest. The music is obviously royalty free music and it's not very fitting when you talk about the punk influence in snowboarding and 80's synth pop in the background. I'm from Sweden - I already had too much of that! It's also very tough to see the chapters come to a conclusion, because they hardly ever do. Instead the makers chose to display endless redundant self glorification with statements like "My son came home from school and told me - Did you know snow is 90% air - we're actually flying" and there tons more of those.Style is only mentioned to display the rivalry of Shaun White and Kevin Pearce - but not its core value to the sport. The whole Olympic fight was dumbed down to a SportsCenter report and we see Reto Lamm named as president of TTR - but it's never mentioned what TTR is! Aside from that it's been WST for over a year now. What about development of shapes, especially the twin tip - which changed everything? What about the corporate aspect around it? Y2K and September 11 didn't boost snowboarding at all - in fact this was the time when most companies went bankrupt. Remember how many there were in the mid 90's? Yeah, right, sorry, there was only Burton! In fact surf companies made a real fortune and became concerns by expanding into snowboarding - Quiksilver, O'Neill, Billabong, Oxbow, Fanatic, etc. are good examples.I also miss the true pioneers of today, i.e. Travis Rice, Jeremy Jones, Nicholas Müller, David Benedek, etc. but instead we hear our dear Gigi saying the most incoherent line of the film while you see riders do some product placement by holding up burning snowboards. Towards the end you will definitely know who sponsored this whole adventure and it's sad that history is completely blurred and rewritten.After 25 minutes into the film my eyes were almost bleeding because of the very bad grading and interlacing - many clips weren't even fluent (even in 1080p), the pictures were very oversaturated and the audio constantly changed level.Young snowboarders will love this film as it repeatedly tells you how great snowboarding is, instead of telling how it became great (with obstacles). Terje quote at the end: "When you stand at the top of the mountain you feel - joy"! This is just not a good documentary but rather an ode from fans to fans. Thank god this is for free!