Riding Giants movie review & film summary (2004)
What a long time it seems since that summer of 1967, when I sat in a Chicago beer garden with the suntanned and cheerful Bruce Brown. He'd just made a documentary named "The Endless Summer," and was touring the country with it, at the moment when surfing was exploding (there were 5,000 surfers in 1959, 2 million today). For Brown, surfing was a lark. With a $50,000 budget, he followed two surfers on an odyssey that led to Senegal, Ghana, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii. They were searching for the "perfect wave," and found it off Durban, South Africa: "A 4-foot curl that gave rides of 15 minutes and came in so steadily it looked like it was made by a machine."
A 4-foot curl? Hamilton and his contemporaries challenge waves of 60 or 70 feet. "The Endless Summer" charts a world of beaches and babes, brews and Beach Boys songs, and surfers who live to "get stoked." In "Riding Giants" the sport is more like an endless winter -- solitary and dangerous. Even as Brown was making "The Endless Summer," modern surfing was being invented by pioneers like Greg Noll of Hawaii, who ventured 15 miles up the coast from Honolulu to Waimea Bay. It was thought to be unsurfable; a surfer asks himself, "can the human body survive the wipeout?" It could. The discovery of the North Shore of Oahu, the movie says, "was surfing's equivalent of Columbus discovering the New World."
More vintage footage. The "storm of the century" descends upon Hawaii, and Noll, known as "The Bull," determines to surf it. His chances of surviving are rated at 50/50 by the movie, at zero by any reasonable person watching it. He survived. It was "the biggest wave ever ridden" -- until, perhaps, the monster that Hamilton found off Tahiti, too big to be measured.
After Bruce Brown finds his Perfect Wave in "The Endless Summer," he marvels: "The odds against a wave like this are 20 million to one!" The odds that Laird Hamilton could get stoked on a 4-foot curl are higher than that. Before seeing "Riding Giants," my ideas about surfing were formed by the Gidget movies, "The Endless Summer," the Beach Boys, Elvis and lots of TV commercials. "Surfin' Safari" was actually running through my head on the way into the screening.
