Big Wednesday

John Milius’ surfing epic isn’t really about surfing at all. It wants to be the surfing generation’s Wild Bunch, an elegy for a lost way of life. It almost gets there.

The story tracks three California surf bums across twelve years—from 1962’s fraternity-style beach culture through Vietnam to 1974’s final reckoning with adulthood. Jan-Michael Vincent plays Matt, the local legend who can’t escape his own mythology. William Katt’s Jack tries to grow up by going to war. Gary Busey’s Leroy just keeps riding waves.

The film works best as an atmospheric hangout movie. There’s something hypnotic about watching these guys drift through their lives, the Pacific Ocean always there, pounding away like a metronome measuring lost time.

Milius grew up in this world and brings a grounded realism to his mythologizing. Consider how the film refuses every easy narrative payoff. Jack goes to Vietnam—but we don’t follow him there. Matt seems poised for redemption—but it never quite arrives. By the finale, when all three paddle out to face twenty-foot waves, you can’t tell if you’re watching reality or Matt’s fever dream of how things should have been.

Basil Poledouris’ score swells with epic grandeur, yet Milius pulls back from melodrama at every turn. A father-figure scene on a condemned pier could have been mawkish. What could have played as triumph or tragedy instead ends in quiet resignation. That restraint gives the film its power.

The fatal flaw? Casting. These actors are supposed to be teenagers in 1962, but Katt’s pushing thirty and Vincent and Busey are past it. Vincent, weathered by off-screen demons, looks forty-plus playing nineteen. The draft board scenes—otherwise brilliant—lose credibility because nobody looks draft age. Compare this to De Palma’s Greetings, shot with a young Robert De Niro.

The film needed to be shot like Linklater’s Boyhood—chronologically, across twelve years. An impossible feat, but Milius was probably the only director who’d attempt it. He didn’t, and that ambition outstrips execution.

Still, Big Wednesday earns its melancholy. It’s an elegy for a generation that traded beaches for mortgages, surf for survival. The ocean keeps pounding. Time keeps moving. And somewhere out there, these three men keep looking for one more perfect wave, hoping it can bring back what they’ve lost. If only for a few seconds.