Although the majority of the public seems to harbor the opinion that there is little point in a remake of POINT BREAK (considering that the original is still pretty darn good, and as the old saying goes: don’t fix what ain’t broke), I like the idea of an action movie that values legitimate stunts performed by extreme athletes, rather than being served a plate of 2 hour constant CGI.
I was among a small group of privileged writers given access to unseen footage of the remake, plus a Q&A with the director himself Ericson Core (INVINCIBLE, FAST & FURIOUS), actor Édgar Ramírez (JOY, ZERO DARK THIRTY, BOURNE ULTIMATUM), extreme mountain snowboarder Xavier De Le Rue, and extreme rock climber Chris Sharma.
For those who haven’t seen the original Point Break by Kathryn Bigelow, starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, it follows federal agent Johnny Utah as he prepares to take down the best bank robbers in town who are carrying our bizarre raids donning ex-president masks, but the moral lines get blurry for Utah once he discovers his new surfing buddy Bodhi and his crew are actually the culprits he’s been chasing.
Though the film is classified as a remake, Core stressed throughout the interview that the authenticity was top priority, labelling it an homage to the original above all. “We certainly weren’t trying to remake the original, we wanted to re-imagine and bring up many of the themes that the film brought up when it came out, and ultimately we live in a slightly different world now than the early 90s – we’re in a much broader world so the idea of the themes of living freely and following your spirit and re-imagining that into what is happening in the world today and the world at large was the key to us.”
There are fundamental differences though, and it’s mainly that the film is no longer centred around the ocean. We’re clearly no longer in the 90’s and surfer grunge really isn’t a thing anymore, nor is it ranked highly on the danger scale in this day in age, so in order to make the revamp contemporary they moved the story away from the water and into the unpredictable progressive world of extreme sports, scouring every corner of the earth for the ultimate locations.
Unlike the original, where their primary motivation for the robberies is not profit, but rebelling against the system that “kills the human spirit” in a post-Reagan era, the remake is far more concerned with the current environmental and economic issues with Bodhi declaring “we give more than we take” as they shower a desolate village in Mumbai with diamonds. The film follows the group trying to complete the Ozaki 8, a set of trials to test the forces of nature and ultimately bring them towards nirvana. Core shared that the most important character in the film is the Earth, and described it as a spiritual battle with political expression.
From the footage to the stories, the challenges the production crew faced were absolutely extraordinary, from battling dangerous cliffs in Angel Falls, Venezuela, to snowboarding the sheer-faced, avalanche-ridden descents of Aiguille De Le Grani, Italy. Core described at one point that they had cameramen following De Le Rue on his snowboarding descent but let him take the reigns on the camera in the end as he was just too rapid and agile. “We wanted the vision from the greatest snowboarder in the world, but the cameramen couldn’t keep up with him.”
My only concern is that they are so primarily focused on promoting POINT BREAK as a contemporary extreme sport revamp, that they’ll forget to add the drama from the 90’s version and, even more importantly, the bromance.
I went in relatively sceptical, but I must hold my hands high and admit, the film looks to be an absolute cracker. Of the snippets we saw, they were only based around the range of extreme sports addressed throughout the film, but that footage is astounding, particularly the wingsuit flying where the stuntmen were travelling upwards of 160mph – it is breathtaking.
Could they have given the remake its own name? Perhaps, but it would have been done only in the hopes to lead the crowd away from the scent of an unnecessary remake. I saw a comment on the internet recently that gave me a laugh: no swayze, no wayze – genius, but let’s give it a chance. Only time will tell.
POINT BREAK is set to hit cinemas in early 2016 in 2D and 3D, with selective release in cinemas on December 25th. Check out the latest trailer below.
https://youtu.be/KvKneCIlIVs
