The sport of surfing has changed a lot since it's inception centuries ago in the South Pacific. Technology know allows surfers to track down the best waves and get there easier, to predict weather conditions and wind patterns before the occur, and to basically enjoy the sport with a lot more safety than what was available to those in years past. It is this enhancement of the sport through technology that is the primary focal point of Philip Boston's 2003 surf documentary, Billabong Odyssey.

The premise of the film is simple enough. Boston and his crew followed some of the world's best surfers around the world searching for roughly a year and a half, in search of the biggest and best waves the oceans of the world had to offer.

The scene opens with footage of Mike Parson's riding out to catch a giant wave that had to be at least fifty feet high. The camera follows him out in close up and then slowly pulls back as he gets up so that the viewer is given the full spectrum of just how huge and how intense the wave is. It's an amazing sequence that should not be missed.

Unfortunately, it's the best part of the movie.

Not that the rest of the film is bad, it's not. The problem is that no matter how hard it tries, the movie never matches the stride that it hits in its opening sequence. There are some other really solid surfing scenes in the movie though and it is well worth checking out, but it never really hits the potential that you figure it's going to after that amazing intro.

There are a lot of interesting technical aspects to tracking and catching the big waves, and the geek in me (yes, hard as it may be to believe, I do have some nerd like tendencies) was intrigued by those aspects of the film but not everyone is going to get the same enjoyment out of learning how hydrofoils enable surfboards to zip along under their own power for miles and miles.

At the end of the film though, we're left wanting. We're left hoping for more of that amazing footage that you saw at the beginning of the film, and while at times the movie comes close to matching it, it never quite gets there, and what we're left with is a solid, if ultimately unremarkable, surfing documentary.

Video:

Picture quality on this release is excellent. The transfer is rendered very nicely without any edge enhancement or compression issue and the colors are very strong. There is a high level of crisp detail is evident throughout the duration and everything is in nice tight focus – no blurring or smearing on the picture at all. So why doesn't the transfer score higher? Because it's cropped. Noticeably cropper. The movie was shot 1.85.1 and Warner Brothers presents it 'modified to fit my TV' at 1.33.1. Sadly, this DOES take away from the viewing experience.