First Descent

Synopsis: Five of the world's best snowboarders travel to Alaska to seek virgin slopes. As the film charts their hair-raising adventure, we are also treated to a history of snowboarding from its roots in the 70s, through its phenomenal growth and to a high-status Olympic sport and adrenaline-pumping global phenomenon that is now a billion-dollar industry.

The five boarders heading to Alaska span the generations. Shawn Farmer and Nick Perata are around 40 years old and among the pioneers of big mountain snowboarding. They go along to see if they still have what it takes. Terje Haarkonsen is Norwegian triple champion and considered the most talented snowboarder ever; he wants the thrill of another "first descent" in unexplored terrain; Hannah Teter is only 18, already a medallist in the X Games (extreme sporting games), and one of the world's best female half-pipe boarders. Shaun White is a snowboarding poster boy, the best freestyler in the world and the youngest to go so far at such an early age. These two junior members of the group are going to Alaska to snowboard wild terrain for the first time in their lives.

The directors come from a background of snowboarding, as well as producing docos and ads for snowboarding pioneers and MTV sports shows. Their love of the sport shows, and the incredible amounts of archival footage they have tracked down is compiled into the first-ever film history of the sport. Some of the old footage is from 16mm and 35mm film, more than 20 years old; interesting but grainy!

First Descent uses a tried and true doco format - intercut the current happenings with a bit of history and a few interviews. Thus we get a diary style with Day 1, Day 2 screen captions for the current Alaskan escapade, chapter headings for each episode of the recent history of the sport, ("Evolution", "Nineties Explosion") and a small amount of background on each of the main five boarders. This is done in a fairly mundane manner, and the lives of the boarders, talented as they are on snow, are not so interesting as to make for riveting watching.

The sections that deal with the sport's history are interesting enough, especially when looking at its rather grungy origins, when boarders were considered obnoxious louts intruding upon the elite sport of skiing. Now, ironically, many ski resorts reserve areas where only boards and no skis are allowed. Its relationship to skateboarding and 80s punk is also alluded to, though Dogtown and Z Boys both showed how a more in-depth exploration of a sporting phenomenon should be made.

What this film concentrates on most is the endless runs that the five adventurers take, and while at times the camera work is breathtakingly awesome, at other times it lapses into repetitive shots, from too far away, of the boarders cutting a line down the snow. Some of the more spectacular footage was taken by helicopter mounted cameras, but I wished that they'd mounted a camera onto one of the boarders to really give the viewer a better sense of what the terrain felt like.

As with many such docos we are treated to the usual philosophical insights about how the experience humbles you and makes you a better person for overcoming your fears. Somehow it doesn't make the film deeply insightful. For aficionados of the sport, its probably a must-see, but for me, an Alaskan travelogue would probably have done just as well! And at nearly two hours, it would have been way better with a major slash and burn by the editor.

 

 

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