Bustin' Down the Door

"Bustin' Down the Door", tells the tale of the rise, fall and rise again of the surfing culture on the North Beach area of Hawaii in the 1970's … and documenting the rise of the professional surfing industry … I felt that even though the story was interesting and some of the archive action shots of the surfers and the waves were very good … although much, too much of the time the camera was focused on the faces of individuals in the story just relating their particular version of the tale to the viewer from their viewpoint … that's why I thought that it would have been far better made as more of a documentary (perhaps for TV) than a big-screen film.

I was also a little disappointed in the music that went with the surf scenes … I thought that this could have been done an awful lot better … maybe, perhaps I may have been too harshly comparing it to the superb Pink Floyd music from the Echoes album that went alongside another "surfer" type film in 1975 called "Crystal Voyager".

I was also a bit annoyed at the "constant" repetition of certain surfing clips over, and over again … it seemed to "cheapen" the overall impact of film by using the same footage many times ...

Otherwise the film (as a documentary) pretty much seemed to capture the mood of the moment in Hawaii in the 1970's and the trials, tribulations, failures and successes of the leading players in the surfing world at the time ...

Narrated well by Edward Norton, some of the main characters being interviewed are quite enigmatic, namely Wayne "Rabbit" Bartholomew, Mark Richards (MR), and Shaun Tomson … but, I feel that you'd probably would need a keen interest in surfing to get fully into this movie … otherwise it's no more than a "passable" documentary

Also, although I saw this at the BFI IMAX cinema, it was shot in 2D (not 3D), and filled 1/2 to a 1/3 of the screen – not the full IMAX screen

I have never been on a surfboard in my life, but thanks to surf documentaries like "Endless Summer", I do think the sport of surfing is pretty cool and something I would like to try before I kick the bucket. So I was interested in watching "Bustin' Down the Door" when I found a copy, especially since it promised to discuss something about the sport I didn't know about before - how surfing became a multi-million dollar industry. While I did find the end results sometimes interesting, I don't think the documentary is as strong as it could be. There is some cool surfing footage, but when it comes to the human angle the movie is really lacking. It's mostly a collection of talking heads, and more often what is said by the participants doesn't add much insight or advance things terribly much. It tells the story in a real slow fashion, and once it gets to interesting topics like the resentment of Hawaiian surfers to the outsiders coming in and shaking things up, it doesn't go into great detail and instead speeds towards the end. Another problem is that the movie often seems to be preaching to the choir, assuming its audience knows a lot about the featured surfers and what they experienced. The documentary is not without interest, but I think the only audience that could really appreciate it would be surfing aficionados.