Review By Justin Skinner & Jay Pinkerton

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"Surfing is the easy part," explains one of the wave-surfing stars of The Billabong Odyssey— a film about, by and for surfboarding enthusiasts. "Surviving is the hard part."

The above sentence is typical of the logic spouted in this trailer, in that it makes no sense and isn't very intelligent. I don't consider myself an expert on surfing by any stretch. In fact, if you clocked in every hour I've spent riding waves, you'd have a grand total of about zero clocked wave-riding hours. Still, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that surfing— the act of taking a board, paddling out into enormous body-crushing tidal waves, then standing on the board as you weave through immense peril, one small misstep away from very certain and most certainly agonizing death  — is very much the hard part. Surviving is actually remarkably easy, provided you do absolutely none of the things I just mentioned.

As a personal maxim, "Surfing is easy, surviving is hard" is bound to lead to trouble down the road if adhered to strictly — specifically when you're getting pounded to the bottom of the ocean and ripped to mangled shreds against jagged rocks, while sharks swoop in to fight over any you-pieces larger than a quarter. At this point you'd be getting some firsthand knowledge as to why it's unwise to seek out truisms from people who willingly get pummeled in the skull by 2000 pounds of wave pressure every day. On the whole, I think "Surfing is easy, surviving is hard" is best left to one of those inspirational posters where somebody stands around on a mountain summit and stares inspirationally at a sunrise; possibly while rainbows pour out of a flock of nearby angels.

Billabong Odyssey is, by my count, the 195th surf movie released this year. And with Super Surf Paradise’s theatrical run already overlapping with Billabong Odyssey and Awesome Surf Party (itself released just a week before Surf Maniacs 2000), they're only serving to cannibalize one another. Watching Billabong's trailer makes you wonder why Hollywood doesn't simply pool their efforts and amalgamate all these films into one gargantuan 16-hour surfing movie. I imagine the people who go to surf movies in the first place (idiots, Annette Funicello) would be infinitely pleased with one enormous film as opposed to ten smaller ones (think of the parking savings alone), and it cuts down on the irritation for the rest of us.

With all these surf movies coming out, some of you might (reasonably) ask what makes Billabong Odyssey different from the rest. The answer is provided in the trailer itself, where a gristle-voiced narrator proclaims that our surfboarding heroes will be “big wave surfing” — making it a stand-out in the field, apparently, against all those other surf movies which deal exclusively with tiny six-inch surfboards and ankle-deep puddles.

The other key difference is that Billabong Odyssey is evidently a documentary. It doesn't look like a documentary, to be honest — every scene in the trailer has a very glossed and rehearsed feel to it — but since I couldn't imagine what the trailer would have to gain by lying about something like that, I'm willing to take its claim at face value and move on.

The implications of watching Billabong's plot unravel, knowing that this is unrehearsed and completely spontaneous, is more than a little disturbing. It's one thing, for instance, to watch the collection of sun-bleached idiocy in a surf movie like Blue Crush. Undoubtedly  it was a painful experience — I won't take anything away from the brave men and women who suffered through it that sad day in the summer of 2002 (lest we forget) — but when the dust settled, those of us in the audience at least had the comfort that the people involved were probably just as ashamed and remorse-filled as we were. We detected the slight winces in the actors' faces when saying lines like "You think you can surf it for real?" or "You were working that like a rib without the sauce." We took comfort in the gleam in their eyes as they went through the motions of their tired plot — a gleam that said, "Yes, we know. But at least we’re eating."

Billabong Odyssey is devoid of any of self-awareness, which somehow makes it that much more frightening. . Here, when one of our heroes assures us that that they're "the Delta Force of surfing,” there isn't a trace of irony or shame to save it. In the process, I'm sure you'll agree, it elevates their team to a near-mythic status previously achieved only by the Green Berets of upholstering, the U.S. Marine Corps of car washing and the SWAT team of office receptionists.

The storyline is straightforward (no sense confusing the surfer audience with “twists” or “surprises” or “polysyllabic words” or “childproof bottle caps”), as our intrepid surfers embark on a contest to find the biggest wave out there. Whoever rides it, wins. You’re in bed the day of the biggest wave? Tough luck, dude. You just missed out on what our surfers are referring to as “the biggest contest in the history of surfing”, which is probably kind of impressive or important to — at a guess — at least a couple and perhaps as many as a dozen people.

I should take a moment here to confess that the only joy I’ve ever gotten out of watching any sort of extreme sport has been when one or more of the competitors has taken a nasty, bone-breaking, never-gonna-be-able-to-have-kids spill. I could never even fathom having to sit through watching a bunch of guys look for waves, then find said waves, then do water ollies or glean the water cube or do whatever it is that surfers do, over and over and over and over and over and over again until the credits roll, the world’s most interminable 90 minutes later..

Mind you, surf fans are a special breed. When one of the surfers in the movie says “You know it’s heavy when the best surfers in the world have a blank look on their face,” my natural inclination, planted as I am firmly in the non-surf fan camp, is to disagree. The way I figure it, when your lifestyle consists of alternately getting concussions from pounding water and getting stoned out of your tree, there ain’t much in the world that’s going to prevent you from just sitting there with a blank look on your face.

That’s why it’s probably best to view this film through two lenses. You have to look at it from the point of view of a long-time surf enthusiast, and you have to look at it separately from the point of view of an intelligent, productive member of society. From the latter viewpoint, I give Billabong Odyssey one and a half Billy Crystals. From the former, I give the movie FOUR TOTALLY RADICALS TO THE EXTREME! in the hopes that I've said something of relevance in their language.

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