Nearly forty years after Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins took a spur-of-the-moment road trip to Patagonia and scaled Cerro Corcovado, Jeff Johnson--inspired by a videotape copy of Mountain of Storms, the homemade film that chronicled Tompkins and Chouinard’s quest--decides to recreate their journey.

CRITIQUE

180˚ South (subtitled Conquerors of the Useless) works better as a travelogue than it does a documentary, but it doesn’t work all that well as a travelogue. It’s formless and rambling, with no narrative thrust or point. Despite the filmmakers’ claim they set out to make a documentary, the movie plays more like it was cobbled together from reels of random footage, stitched together in an attempt to contrive a narrative. It works on occasion, and there’s some fantastic sights contained within the loose framework, but on the whole it’s a miss.

The movie starts off fine enough, providing some background on the participants and chronicling the first leg of Johnson’s journey. But then comes an accident-- the mast of the ship on which Johnson is traveling is snapped like a twig and tumbles overboard, dragging with it supplies and equipment--that forces a detour to Rapa Nui. There follows a brief history lesson on what likely brought about the downfall of the island’s native population (which is interesting), as well as far too much footage of Johnson’s burgeoning relationship with a woman he meets on the island (which isn’t).

The movie’s structure begins to unravel, the narrative line replaced by shots of the couple surfing, sitting around, surfing, and sitting around (the layover lasted a month). Meanwhile, while Johnson is off enjoying himself, the ship’s captain is forced to jerry-rig a new mast out of the trunk of a tree, but we only get to see the end result. Given the movie’s purported purpose, you’d the efforts to get the boat back in sailable shape would be the main focus here, not Johnson’s relationship; giving time to the latter is not only foolish from a storytelling perspective, it also comes off as self-indulgent. Yeah, yeah, it’s all about the journey and how the journey affects you, but eating up precious time with puppy love is just wrong.

The trip finally gets back underway, but the movie doesn’t. The journey from Rapa Nui to Chile is condensed down to two quick shots, and the movie then moves into a half-baked exploration of how industrialization has changed the Chilean landscape. There’s a shot of a jungle that is dotted with electrical transmission towers, which is a powerful image. But it’s undermined by a context-free attempt to decry the rape of the country’s environment by pointing the finger at faceless corporations and outside influences (as well as Pinochet, although it’s hard to criticize someone for taking shots at Pinochet), which ultimately amounts to a hollow effort.

The movie is biting off far more than it can chew, using platitudes and what amounts to anguished sighs to attempt to make a statement that can only really be made in a movie far longer and far more clear and in-depth than this one even tries to be.

The final act really rambles. Johnson and his pals (two of his friends from the States meet up with him in Patagonia, but they’re not really worth mentioning, as we know nothing about them other than one likes to climb and the other surf) have some conversations with Chouinard and Tompkins, who are attempting to preserve large swaths of land (roughly two millions acres) purchased by the latter. That I found interesting, as it illustrated one way a longtime idealist has learned to move and shake in the real world, and also delved into the mindset gap between Tompkins (who, to put it crudely, grew up) and Chouinard (a guy who incessantly rails against corporate mentality in all its forms but once filed for Chapter 11 protection for a company he founded in order to get out of some lawsuits that had been filed against him), who are far more interesting individuals than Johnson or anyone else who appears in the movie.

But then the focus shifts to some Gauchos, who are shown participating in a protest against a dam that’s scheduled to be built in the territory they call home, but once again there’s no context for this, so it lands without impact. And it’s only after all of this has been dealt with that the movie (finally) shows Johnson and his buddies attempting to scale Cerro Corcovado, which almost seems like an afterthought. (The only thing memorable about this sequence is Chouinard’s ironic rant about not being able to climb the mountain because of all the vegetation.) This is supposed to be the movie’s reason for being, but it ends up comprising something like one-tenth of the total running time.

It would be one thing if the amorphous nature of the narrative served a purpose, perhaps positing the idea that any such undertaking as this isn’t going to be a clean, easy one, but it just feels sloppy and ramshackle. 180˚ South isn’t the chronicle of an unpredictable, the-getting-there’s-the-thing journey, it’s simply just a messy attempt to fashion a very loose narrative around a bunch of random incidents and images. It either needed to have a clear purpose and stick to it, or it needed to present itself as a simple visual diary. Its aims and arguments--both lofty and simple--get lost in the shuffle, rendering it ineffectual.

THE VIDEO

Given the original photography, the 1.78:1/1080p transfer--encoded with AVC onto a 25GB disc--looks about as good as you could hope. Captured on consumer-grade digital video, the image can look very good in close-ups and bright exteriors, but tends to flatten out some in medium and long shots.

Some patches of dark solids can exhibit quite a bit of noise, and there’s some moiré and stair-stepping on display (in one long shot, a waterfall breaks up into a patchwork of white blocks and black lines). The footage that was culled from Mountain of Storms (I don’t know exactly what type of source it was taken from) quite naturally looks rough and grainy, with colors that rarely hold steady, but I was surprised that it didn’t look far worse than it does.

THE AUDIO

The only audio option is a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track, which is largely locked in the front channels. A couple of surround effects do pop up, and there’s some minor music bleed, but otherwise it’s front-and-center. The music (some of which was composed and performed by Shins frontman James Mercer) sounds good, but the dialogue and narration are a little lifeless. English SDH subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

The Making of 180˚ South (23 minutes, SD) is an okay behind-the-scenes featurette, providing background information on Chouinard and Tompkins’s journey and covering the logistics of the shoot (some the particulars of which make the whole thing seem less spontaneous and unplanned than the filmmakers would have us believe).

A Look at 180˚ South (2 minutes, SD) is a short promo piece.

Five deleted scenes (18 minutes, SD) consist mostly of more surfing footage from the Rapa Nui sequence, although there’s also some unfunny comic relief in the form of jokes about one participant’s resemblance to a certain mythical inhabitant of the Himalayas and a bit where one of the climbs is mapped out.

The Music (38 minutes) offers footage of performances of several of the songs featured in the movie, as well as a couple of short interviews with the music’s creators/performers.

Closing out the extras is the movie’s theatrical trailer, which is presented in high-def.

The disc also offers BD-Live access, although there’s no movie-specific content available.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Whatever purpose 180˚ South initially had gets buried in a jumble of narrative loose ends, needless digressions, and ramblings attempts at relevance. Where’s David Elfick when you really need him?