Barely a Splash


Barely a Splash:
A Review by: Nicole Klein
How does one take the sport of large-waving surfing, a sport where one risk serious injury of a slow and painful death  by drowning just to skate along on 30 foot wave boring? It seems the director of the documentary Heavy Water aimed to do just that. Aside from way too many slow motion pans across mountainous gushing waves, this documentary seems to lack the stakes this real-world story already had. Heavy Water focuses its attention on a series of surfer Nathan Fletcher’s exploits, leaving little more than talking heads and those same shots of Hokusai-esque waves over and over and over again. It isn’t until the tail end of the documentary that a pattern starts to emerge; fletcher seeks to honor deceased friends and family members through pioneering what he calls the ‘acid drop’, a dive from a helicopter onto the largest wave he can find. It’s quite a shame that this was the most compelling story this film could muster, as it only occupies 15 of its 84 minutes.
4.5/10
·         Director: Michael Oblowitz
·         Producer: Michael Oblowitz and others
·         Cast: Nathan Fletcher, Makua Rothman, Danny Fuller, Herbie Fletcher

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