Riding Giants

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Anyone who saw last year's big-wave eye-popper Step Into Liquid thinking this will offer the same thrills, would be right. But there's much more to Riding Giants than just riding giants.

Not only does it succeed in tying together a history of surf culture, it traces the brilliantly foolhardy men who took on the big waves as soon as the boards were up to it, through to today's daredevils, such as Laird Hamilton, who have developed the technique of taking 18m waves with a jetski tow-in.

Yes, it's spectacular throughout.

Fortunately, though, it also has stories to tell and some real characters to tell them, such as the now 68-year-old Greg "the Bull" Noll who was the first to brave the drop at Hawaii's Waimea. Or Jeff Clark who surfed the foreboding waves at Mavericks, north of San Francisco, alone for 15 years, having spotted them from his school window.

Mavericks also gives the film's biggest emotional punch, with its footage surrounding the 1994 death of Hawaiian legend Mark Foo after a seemingly routine wipeout at the break.

The period footage shows the days when surfing was still a fledgling counter-culture before Gidget movies, the Beach Boys and the like sold it to the world. It's frequently hilarious, too - shots of wave-deprived 60s Californian beach bums dressed in SS uniforms using storm drains as waterslides show them as the ancient ancestors of Jackass, and possibly the origin of the potentially worrying term "surf nazi".

The film does suffer a little from too much of Hamilton - credited as executive producer - who, as a particularly self-absorbed interviewee, seems to be under the impression the movie is all about him.

But that's forgiven when you see him face yet another moment of reckoning involving a few tonnes of fast collapsing ocean armed only with a length of fibreglass and his wits.

A real swell film.

DIRECTOR: Stacy Peralta
RATING: M
RUNNING TIME: 101 mins
SCREENING: Village, Hoyts