Why Point Break Endures

Few people thought much about a 1991 film release about an undercover FBI agent pursuing surfer bank robbers. It featured a young, relatively unknown actor named Keanu Reeves (hey isn't that the guy from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure?). And Patrick Swayze? Well I guess he wanted to take a movie off.

29 years later, Point Break is generally considered to be one of the best movies of the 1990's. It's gained momentum through time, even spawning restaurants called "Point Break Live" where diners get up from their table and quote lines of the movie to their fellow patrons. It even spawned a remake (in 2015) that was so awful it actually made the original more popular.

First off, let me start by saying if you've never seen 1991's Point Break, I mean, cmon. Table stakes. Seriously, like now. This isn't acceptable.

Why Point Break endures is a mystery for many. It absolutely has first rate action, shot wonderfully by then unknown Kathryn Bigelow (before she won Best Director years later for Hurt Locker and before Zero Dark Thirty fame). It uses the ocean beautifully in all of the surfing scenes, has good performances, and has probably the best foot chase in film history.

But why it endures, I believe, is the films undercurrent of rebelling against the system. All of us have probably taken inventory of our professional lives at least once and said "Damn, I'd rather be flyfishing/surfing/hiking/travelling/biking/etc". But we don't. We conform to whatever real or imagined expectation we feel we need to conform to. Point Break taps into that feeling. Bodhi and his group run against that conformity. Obviously committing crimes to do that = Bad. But everyone feels that energy sometimes. Very few of us ever actually do anything about it.

Do I have a point? Yeah. Which is: Don't conform yourself. Pursue your professional dreams, work hard, but always have a part of yourself that none of that can touch. The part of you that wants to fly to (obviously assuming a post pandemic world) Italy and drive through the Tuscany countryside, or bounce to Fiji for a week of surfing. Do it because you can. Do it because you will.

Do it because you want to not because you have to. (obviously when the Pandemic is over, seeing as such that no other country will allow us into theirs at the moment :)