Riding Giants, Stacy Peralta's brilliant documentary about the history of big wave surfing is a prominent member of my DVD collection. It was perfect to me: gave a real sense of what the period was like when big wave surfing started, gave great intros into the sport's personalities and the spots that have featured in its development, and was just brilliantly shot.
Steep seems fragmented by comparison. Maybe this is just because I don't know the history of extreme skiing to the same degree as surfing, but the people involved seemed humorless, uninteresting, and lamely philosophical (I can't count the number of times "ultimate extreme" was uttered). It went through a bit of the history, but a lot of it seemed really overly dramatized and taken out of context--it was hard to understand how the various innovations strung together and gave no real insight into the people involved, because they themselves were so helpless to explain everything (both because of the intensity of their experiences and their pseudo-philosophical nonsense).
It's much better to let the footage do the talking for such things and the footage was indeed beautiful and for the most part palm-sweat-inducing, but I was left thinking that I would have rather just rented an extreme skiing documentary.
I don't know, if you're really into extreme skiing, you'll probably enjoy it, but if you are looking for an adrenaline-fueled visual feast, stick to riding giants or other extreme skiing docs (most of which are incredible to watch).
