Rampage

A road movie before it is a climbing movie, and the founding document of American bouldering. In 1999 an eighteen-year-old Chris Sharma loads into a beat-up RV with Obe Carrion and drives the American West, establishing hundreds of problems at areas that were only then being discovered. Josh and Brett Lowell made it, and it is one of their first films.

This is for anyone who wants to see a scene inventing itself. Crashpads, desert light, and a teenager who happens to be the strongest person in the sport treating the whole country as an open project list. Skip it if you want to see hard bouldering by today's standards. The grades are historical now, and the film is seventy-seven minutes of late-nineties pacing.

What works is Sharma at the exact moment he became the person everyone else measured themselves against. The film catches that, and it catches Carrion as a full partner rather than a sidekick. What it gets wrong is length. Seventy-seven minutes is a lot of van, and the second half repeats the first.

Best Of The West, Michael Call's film about Sharma returning to Hueco Tanks in 2005, is the natural companion: same climber, seven years later, a deep cast around him. Watch Rampage first. It is where the whole thing started, for Sharma and for the Lowell brothers both.