All IMAX pics fall into the gee-wiz category of movie experiences; it’s not the filmmaking and content, so much, that’s thrilling, it’s that gigantic screen. Right near the beginning of this big fat spectacle of water and colour, which is supposed to be about surfing and Polynesia, there’s a shot of Tahiti from the air that’s so much bigger than life it’s more like sci-fi than documentary. The islands, green sharp points thrust out of an impossibly blue ocean, look CGI perfect. They’re not, of course, they’re absolutely real, but since this is an IMAX film, nothing looks real. Everything seems picture post card beautiful – the way things always look in insurance ads or tourist brochures.
What’s great about the IMAX format, especially in 3D is that its possible to shoot totally mundane activities, like getting out of a car and make it exciting. Throughout Ultimate Wave, director Stephen Low sticks to the familiar IMAX shooting style. He almost always manages to find an angle that’s impossible in life, but looks positively epic on the multi-storied size IMAX frame; even when it isn’t odd or strange its spectacular. In one bit he puts his camera on the front of a car, shooting back at the front seat windscreen, with two surfboards strapped to its roof. This is a shot most surf movie fans would know but there’s a wry joke here. In 3D the surf boards sharply pointed noses seem to thrust right out of the screen so fiercely you want to duck for fear of losing an eye.
At other times the visual gags are pretty obvious; Low has the camera strapped to the nose of boards or surf canoes to put the audience in the moment – in these scenes we slide through waves in great vertiginous sweeps the massive soundtrack pumping with the sonic thump of a ocean sliding all around.
Still, for all of its new-age tech, the movie's actual style and approach seems like a throw back to old natural science educational films of the 50s. Narrated by Michael Hanrahan in a voice that sounds less like God and more like a deputy principal, Ultimate Wave is supposed to be about how two veteran surfers, US born nine times world-champ Kelly Slater and Tahitian Raimana Van Bastoler, prepare to ride the notorious – and scarily huge – waves of Teahupo’o. But neither man emerges as a character or even a particularly strong personality. Both mature men, well passed their youthful athletic prime, they look great surfing, or even when they’re just admiring one of the many ocean scape sunset shots featured in the film; but the movie reduces each personality to a press-kit brief"¦ Raimana, we find out via the voice-over, is a spiritual man and Slater lives to surf, and surfs to live. When they’re not in the water, the pair just look embarrassed to be on camera. To break up the water/postcard/surf action visual formula Ultimate Wave works in a lot of casual shots of very young, fit looking bikini clad girls whose identities remain anonymous, probably because their casting in the movie seems boldly obvious eye-candy.
Since the 'doco" plot is so thin, the movie seems to be more 'about" why the surfing in Tahiti is just so damn good (if you can say it's about anything). The movie cuts away from its two heroes to some extremely impressive and detailed digitally-animated material that provides a precise scientific explanation about how surf 'works’ and why the undersea topography and tides of Tahiti make such impressive waves, so consistently.
Before the surfer-heroes ride the waves in the movies last ten minutes, there are quite a few episodes inserted awkwardly into the film about Tahitian 'culture’ – which turns out to be shots of the indigenous population"¦dancing. This footage is like watching a hugely budgeted version of the kind of display governments entertain visiting diplomats with at formal receptions. The dancers are terrific and the feeling is joyous, but its all a bit queasy because it just seems such a sop to the tourist industry.
When the big waves finally do come, it’s a strangely anti-climatic experience; the action is in slow-mo mostly and the camera puts us right inside the waves or on the boards, but there’s no sense of speed or even danger (the fancy expert footwork of the film's two stars make it look ridiculously second nature). Still, this weird co-mingling of nature doc; surf pic and travel catalogue does have a holding power. The 40-odd minutes just flash by and it's afterward you start to think about how naff the movie was; even if the ride was like, way-cool.
