Riding Giants

Director: Stacy Peralta
Year: 2004

Size matters, courage is king and what the f*@k do these guys think they’re doing are three things that may swim in your head as you watch this epic documentary. It’s loaded with archival footage that looks like it was rescued from a series of garage sales, with amazing points of view and perspectives on what the culture of surfing has meant and how it is evolving still today.

Big wave riding has played a part in many other films – from narrative bombs of the sixties like “Ride the Wild Surf” to the 1991 cult classic “Point Break”. To paddle out into a lineup of salty monsters is cinematic short hand for this dude’s a kook – and a gunslinger all rolled into one. Documentaries about big waves are plentiful, too. But in Riding Giants, Director Stacy Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys) puts together the history of waves in a way that shines new light on the cultural significance of those who chose to take on these epic walls of water, the fears they faced and how they ultimately did it.

The man vs. nature trope is a common one in film, dramatized in such narrative films as “Castaway”, “127 Hours” and “Into the Wild”. Documentaries have touched on this, too, with films like “Touching the Void”, “Grizzly Man” and pretty much anything by National Geographic. The appeal of the relationship between our species and our environment is universal and timeless. We are made to question and strive for achievements, breaking down barriers, slaying dragons and riding giants. So it goes with big wave riding.

If you’ve never seen big waves in person, it’s hard to appreciate the majesty or, perhaps better stated, freakishness of their power. Seeing Riding Giants, particularly  on the big screen, might give you a glimpse. The first time I saw Pipeline break on the North Shore of Oahu was in 1993. I was working on cruise ships at the time and enjoying a day off on the wild side of the island. I had ridden many waves for about ten years of my life leading up to that point up and down the California coast and other, much more tame, parts of Hawaii.

Watching these mammoth creatures rise, tip and explode over the shallow reef, right near the shore, my first thought was they weren’t real at all. When facing something so large it’s foreign, it’s common for the brain to try to associate it with the next closest thing to make sense of it. The only thing I could think was that the waves looked animated – drawn, created from someone’s imagination. And the people riding them were insane action superheroes from another time or reality, transported here through the animator’s creation.

Riding Giants harnesses that power in its leading men, Greg Noll, Jeff Clark and Laird Hamilton. These three big wave pioneers have all the moody, temperamental nature of great historical explorers driven by something they likely don’t even understand. They see the same things everyone else does, things that have existed unquestioned (and almost certainly unridden) perhaps for thousands of years, but they look at them differently. The fact that they act on their instincts and “boldly go where no man has gone before” makes them larger than life paradigm shifters.

Riding Giants receives my heartiest of endorsements as a landmark achievement for raising the bar on a sport that, to the uninitiated might have appeared to peak, and the scratching the surface on the significance of what these accomplishments mean.

Resonance Rating: 5 out of 5