Base

If you see a group of wing­suit-clad adren­a­line junkies jump­ing off a tall edi­fice and actu­al­ly enjoy­ing them­selves, they’re prob­a­bly BASE jumpers. This extreme sport involves div­ing then para­chut­ing from a build­ing, anten­na, span or cliff (“Earth” for the sake of the acronym) and then rak­ing in that adren­a­line high. This fly-on-the-wall doc-fic­tion fea­ture by Richard Par­ry fol­lows the life of a sin­gle jumper, JC (played by real-life ath­lete Alexan­der Pol­li), who films not only his jumps but every oth­er minute of his life too.

At first the dra­ma feels like a doc­u­men­tary about JC. Using exten­sive GoPro footage from Polli’s own jumps. The film opens on immer­sive, exhil­a­rat­ing scenes of JC and his best friend and fel­low jumper, Chico (fly­ing pro Car­los Pedro Briceño), mid-flight. They soar over turquoise swim­ming pools and land on sweep­ing beach­es in Brazil, the first of many stops in their glo­be­trot­ting adven­ture. The cam­era is con­nect­ed to the ath­letes as they glide through the air allow­ing us to expe­ri­ence the drops from a first-per­son perspective.

Despite the intrigu­ing source mate­r­i­al and an aes­thet­ic com­mit­ment to rov­ing fish-eye real­ism, it boasts a painful­ly stale script. It strug­gles to stir believ­able excite­ment as trite soap-opera lev­els of guilt and betray­al are scat­tered between jumps, and there are very few moments you can’t see com­ing. The uncer­tain­ty of a jump trag­i­cal­ly fore­shad­ows an acci­den­tal death and a fiery love inter­est (Julie Dray) whips up some run-of-the-mill emo­tion­al turbulence.

The dia­logue makes the film feel like a sports­wear advert, brim­ming with embar­rass­ing slo­gans: ​“Peace. Hold on to it!” JC exhorts. There’s a labo­ri­ous tug of war between the raw sus­pense of the sport and an unsur­pris­ing suc­ces­sion of events. Who real­ly died? Is JC still jump­ing? Was he ever? The clos­ing cred­its answer some of these ques­tions, but most­ly add to the con­fu­sion by fur­ther blur­ring the line between fact and fic­tion. It’s dif­fi­cult to pin­point who’s real, who’s alive, what actu­al­ly hap­pened and, most impor­tant­ly, why we should care.