Step Into Liquid

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * *)

Best advice to really enjoy this surfing documentary, even to members of the board fraternity: take your walkman.

The soundtrack is awful and the interview segments with surfers from all over America (and one famous Australian) are repetitive, the participants' cosmic pronouncements sounding too worn smooth in the retelling to be entertaining.

You wish director, narrator and interviewer Dana Brown had taken the advice of one of his film's early talking heads, X-Files creator and surfer Chris Carter, who says the more surfers try to explain their obsession the less sense they make.

Brown is the son of pioneering surf documentarian Bruce Brown (who gets to have his say), who made the 1966 film Endless Summer and a sequel with his son in 1994.

Brown jnr does have an eye for the quirks of surf culture, whether it's the guy in Northern California who has been surfing every day, without fail, since the mid 70s, the Midwest guys who ride the sloppy shallow brown water of Lake Michigan when the wind is right, or the Texans who go for miles on the wake of supertankers heading between Galveston and Houston.

But the rest of the 90 minutes is spent in a constant globe-trot quest to find the meaning of surfing, as well as to show what really large waves look like from as many angles as possible.

That, of course, generates plenty of astonishing moments. Some are purely visual, like the underwater view of surfers duck-diving under an incoming wave as it passes over a hazardous coral reef.

Many, of course, are the don't-try-this-at-home-variety, especially the episodes showing jetski-powered tow-in surfing on Hawaii's North Shore with the surfers on newly developed hydrofoil-finned boards allowing them to hover above the surface chop of the swell.

And then there's the film's grand finale, when it heads 160km off the coast of San Diego to the Cortes Bank, an undersea mountain which generates waves of 20m-plus when the wind is right.

Witnessing the foolhardy descend these mountains of water, it might be best to pause that personal soundtrack, as the sound of your jaw-dropping and your pulse racing should be enough backing music.

Director: Dana Brown

Rating: PG (low-level offensive language)

Running time: 88 mins

Screening: Rialto, Bridgeway from Boxing Day