Ultimate X or How I Learned to Break My Face

May 11, 2002

Go see this. It’s the X-Games writ large on the IMAX format, a perfect 42 minutes of the mindblowing footage of skateboarding, bmx, motocross and street luge. Blown up to this scale, the madness of the “action sports” really begins to take a new life beyond what’s normally seen on ESPN2.

Apart from the beautifully shot IMAX footage, there’s also a ton of blown up digital footage of cameras mounted on to the athletes themselves. The most breathtaking is the material shot from the sleds of the street lugers. Hurtling down a hill at 80mph, the cameras capture the jostling as well as the pure velocity of the sport. The ground footage shot from the front of the luge is positively vomit inducing. There’s also some wonderful shots of the BMX work, including the footage of one fallen downhill BMXer crawling up a dirt ridge as his competitors launch over him. It’s straight out of D-Day.

The appeal of watching breaks down like this: “I didn’t know anyone could do that!” and “Dude, did he just shatter his junk?” To these athletes, the latter is somehow justified by the former. The sheer amount of brutal physical abuse (one motox guy had so many injuries he referred to his bones in shorthand, like “left tib” and “right fib”) is meaningless when you can fly for those fleeting seconds.

Posted in Moving Pictures