The Art of Flight

Today marked a time of much running around and preparation for an upcoming move, all of which created a very long day with many a dose of fun anxiety.  The original plan was to watch a very deep and thought provoking moving this evening, but after realizing the effects of ‘lazy brain’ that I was suffering, it seemed a better choice to watch something that was a little easier to ponder.  What I ended up viewing is a documentary called The Art of Flight which follows snowboarder Travis Rice as he travels and experiences many different alpine locales.

What stands out first and foremost in this movie is the beauty that is captured, as the visuals of the mountain and scenery are able to create a true sense of awe in the viewer.  There have been many films I have seen that have a hard time capturing the sense of height and slope, but the cinematography in The Art of Flight gives a very honest feel of the majesty and grandeur of the mountains.  Not only is the physical environment captured well, but the scenes of snowboarding are fast, exciting, and create a sensation of the limits being pushed by the riders.

However, it is not all great and grand.  As amazing as the visuals are, and as exhilarating as the snowboarding is, it begins to get fairly repetitive.  They do attempt to change things up quite often through the film, but there really is only so many times you can see someone go off a jump before you are no longer entranced by the act.  Seeing it over and over again makes it exist in a realm of common place, and thus it is no longer as interesting as it was the first ten times you saw it.  This can be an enormous fault of many sports videos, as they most often are comprised of one amped up montage after another.  I could really go for a Red Bull right now.

Oh, and I should mention that.  You will see Red Bull everywhere you look in this movie because they sponsored it, and they are not subtle about that fact.

What makes a great sports documentary stand out from the others is to allow the audience to gain an understanding of the event, and the drive and desires that course through the bodies of those who are obsessed with it.  Only from time to time does The Art of Flight take a chance to hear the reflections of the participants, and this causes it to miss out on I find makes this sort of film extraordinary.  When I gain a true sense of the passion, and hear the personal impact that snowboarding has on people, that is when it is the most interesting.  It allows the door to be opened to both the beauty of the visuals, but also to an understanding of what is a spiritual affair for some.

 

It also had an opportunity to frame snowboarders in a more mature and contemplative light, which it did pull off at times as we got a few glimpses behind the bravado.  Unfortunately it also reinforced any and all stereotypes of the perpetually adolescent male when we get scenes of bored snowboarders shooting down pine trees with shotguns and shooting at objects that explode.  The reason why this is a shame is because the quality of this film created a chance to reach an audience beyond just the snowboarding community and it was a chance to show the world that there is more to their image than what most people’s minds quickly conjure up.

Beautiful, yes, it really is a beautifully shot film.  Insightful?  At a moment, here or there it is and allows the audience to get an understanding of the passion of the snowboarder.  While it is a whole lot of eye candy, it is not able to stay consistently fresh and misses out on many opportunities to connect with the audience.  I would recommend this film for the visuals and for some of the snowboarding scenes, but it is hard to recommend the whole package.

Rating – 2 out of 4 stars