Point Break Official Trailer 2015

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What do you think of this? The ultimate tribute, or an unmitigated travesty? Most kitesurfers came from a water based background and as such they can’t have failed to get through life without watching one of the greatest films of our time. Point Break, the original one with Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze and Gary Busey. Oh and lets not forget the smoking hot Lori Petty who, lets face it, everybody wanted to teach them to surf.

It was filled with one liners like “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a dead rhino, I should have had you get me three of these things!” and classics like “Listen you snot-nose little shit, I was takin’ shrapnel in Khe Sanh when you were crappin’ in your hands and rubbin’ it on your face.” all delivered eloquently by the talented Gary Busey of Big Wednesday fame. Yes the film was loaded with cheese, yes Keanu’s acting was as ever questionable, but the entire premise of the film was believable.

It was set in a time when you could still go and rob a bank with a gun and get away with a stack of cash, the waves that were surfed were all realistically sized (aside from the ending at Bells Beach) and skydiving was something that a lot of people had as hobbies. The basic premise was that while it escaped reality with the story line it was ultimately believable, after all “it’s the ultimate rush”.

When I heard they were remaking one of the greatest films of our generation, when taken with a pinch of salt, a little piece of me cringed inside. How many people are there in Hollywood right now with less imagination than an amoeba? It seems that every film that comes out has been done before, is a remake or just follows that same boring storyline we have seen a thousand times already. Strange then that the price of a movie ticket has gone through the roof and yet the originality coming out of Tinseltown had stooped lower than the F16 that buzzed the tower in Top Gun.

I then read about the myriad of pro surfers involved and the amount of work that was being put into making the surfing sections of the movie realistic. When you put a list of names like this together only good can come from it surely… Laird Hamilton, Sebastian Zietz, Makua Rothman, Billy Kemper, Brian Keaulana, Ahanu Tson-dru, Ian Walsh, Laurie Towner, Dylan Longbottom, Albee Layer, Bruce Irons, Tikanui Smith and Tuhiti Humani.

It’s a roster to get any waterman excited, and the locations for the shoot, Teahupoo in Tahiti and Jaws in Maui back that list up with huge credentials too. Perhaps this modern travesty wasn’t going to be so bad after all… There were stories emerging of Jaws and Chopes being closed for filming days with the crews getting into some seriously gnarly waves, but not much else was coming out of the woodwork.

Now we have this, the first trailer for the movie that will be released at Christmas, and I’ll freely admit it’s made me a little sad. The film has the same name, and the same characters, and an identical storyline too. That’s bad as a lot of young kids will think this is it, this is Point Break and they’ll be denied the knowledge of the fantastic original. Why not make it Point Break 2, mix things up a bit, have Tyler’s kid be in it or something to make it modern and relevant. At it’s heart this looks like an identicopy rehash of a film that didn’t need to be meddled with.

At first glance it seems to be totally unrealistic compared to the original too. When the first film came out I surfed, windsurfed and rode MTB’s and considered myself part of an elite crew of people who had found something else away from the football fields, dead-end-jobs and hum drum of daily life. I could relate to the characters in the movie in a sense that although I would never rob a bank, I was a broke surfer and it did kind of make you think, that maybe just maybe you could pull that off.

From what I have seen from the trailer though this is such a suspense of reality it just looks like it’s gone too far. Just about every surfer or skydiver or even bank robber could relate to the original. This one though, I very much doubt that will be the case. Even though they used real surfers for the waves they’ve somehow managed to edit them so they look computer generated. And the rest of the movie looks totally overdone too, with more CGI than you’d expect in a science fiction epic.

Time will tell and I’ll no doubt watch the movie in full when it comes out, but I can’t help thinking they’ve ruined something that was perfectly good in it’s current format. This quote from the late great Mr Swayze himself sums it up nicely…