In God's Hands 1998, Rated PG-13 Columbia/Tristar Home Video

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Just as you don't use the same set of standards when comparing a stellar film like North by Northwest with a drunken fraternity movie like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, you can't judge surfing films by the same standards of their non wave-riding counterparts. Like female guest stars on Seinfeld, surfing films should be glossy, exotic, beautiful, and filled with as many hills and valleys (in the ocean of course) as possible. And in this respect, Zalman King's In God's Hands is a good movie.

I will get this out of the way now: the screenwriting in In God's Hands, courtesy of King and Surfer Magazine editor Matt George, who also stars as the character of Mickey, is about as bad as any writing I've ever seen that was not specifically created by high-schoolers for an English class production intent on looking at the perils of teenage drinking. Scenes and situations are brought up throughout the film that are just dropped and never mentioned again, and, conversely, there are certain elements of the script that need to be mentioned that never are--the lead characters relationship with a Brazilian woman who may, or may not be his wife, for one. But coherent screenwriting is not the point of In God's Hands. Nor is good acting. Or a palpable sense of character growth. What In God's Hands is about is surfing, and preparing to surf, the insane 35-40 foot waves that sometimes break on Hawaii's north shore. And in this sense, the movie delivers.

King's usage of footage shot while the two leads surfed the aforementioned 5 story tall waves was superb, often combining shots taken by in-the-water cameras, with shots taken from nearby rescue helicopters and jet-skis to create an eerie sense of tension as the psychologically deemed "completely nuts" surfers shot the curl and handled elevator drops the likes of which I don't encounter in my worst surfing nightmares.

The two leads, played by real life surfers Shane Dorian and George, travel from one beautiful local to the next, ultimately meeting up with several other big wave surfers in Bali, where they begin to train for their trip to Hawaii. Once in Hawaii, the group meets up with huge waves and the best sponger (body-boarder) in the world, Mike Stewart. The eight men are jet-skied out into the channel of waves and then pulled into the waves by the jet-skis (to paddle over the top of these monstrous waves, as surfers do on smaller sized waves, is something akin to suicide). And for the next twenty minutes, I breathlessly watching Dorian and company handling wave after wave, occasionally wiping out, but quickly recovering to ride again.

When I look out my office window, I see a cold, gray, cold, snowy, and cold Chicago, filled with people bustling to their jobs and wearing jackets which make them look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. I screened In God's Hands and was instantly transported to a warmer, slower paced environment, where people get to surf everyday, something, even with our drysuits, we just can't do on third coast waves. This added some much needed energy and pep to my day and a sense of warmth to my heart. For sheer glossy, superficial, surfing movies, you're not going to be able to top In God's Hands.