Like, totally awesome.

Step into Liquid Directed by Dana Brown The primordial cliche "A picture is worth a thousand words" finds feature-length verification in Step Into Liquid. This surfing documentary is directed by Dana Brown, the son of Bruce Brown, who directed The Endless Summer (1966) and The Endless Summer II (1994), two nonfiction features that found a passionate following among surfers, wannabes and anybody who dug looking at slow-mo footage of Zen-cool beach bums riding curls. The younger Brown's effort feels like a more technologically adept remake of his dad's work, or perhaps a continuation (and expansion). Like his pop, Dana Brown sees surfing not just as a way of life, but The Way. His tone is a contradictory one: missionary yet relaxed-a religious pilgrim who offers prospective converts a fat doobie before he starts quoting scripture.

Many of the movie's tales have an intimate, quasi-Oprah tone, like those People magazine features on non-famous people who conquered a dreaded illness, or network-tv Olympic profiles designed to prove that a certain speed skater or decathalete is the nicest, most tenacious, noblest person who ever played the sport. Brown's subjects range from the inspirational (a surfer partly paralyzed in a wipeout who's retraining himself by lying on a board and riding little waves) to the obsessive (Dale Webster, who won't rest until he's surfed more than 10,000 consecutive days) to the utopian (the Irish-American Malloy brothers, who go to Ireland to teach Catholic and Protestant kids to surf together).

And of course there are flat-out thrill-seekers, including quixotic Texans who surf in the wakes left by oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico, and tow-in surfers who go deep into the sea in order to ride immense, otherwise unreachable waves. (The latter try their luck in the Cortes Bank about 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, an area that generates legendary 60-foot waves once a decade. It's the end of Point Break, only real.)

I wouldn't call the result art, exactly. Liquid's interviews and voiceover comments are infomercial-y, never more so than when they aim for cosmic significance. Like the equally exciting skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, Liquid preaches the surfing lifestyle, even sells it as a world view, and keeps selling and selling and selling. If surfers weren't so inherently laid back and unpushy, the film might be insufferable.

The images carry the day, as images often do. In a sense, the surf documentary is a fairly simple, even primitive genre-a sun-kissed, full-color, rectangular-screen version of those early "spectacle" movies from cinema's earliest years, when audiences swarmed nickelodeons for a chance to see footage of wars, forest fires, coronations and other big events (or crafty recreations of same). Like those early works, Liquid is a You Are There picture, less a story than an experience-a ride that would make a great Imax movie. Photographed by cinematographer John-Paul Beeghly in a variety of theatrical formats, its images feel huge, dense, weighted, practically iconic.

There's a god-like effortlessness to much of the camerawork-a remarkable achievement in itself, considering how hard it must have been to get some of the shots. Employing gyroscopically stabilized helicopter mounts and surf cams, and often covering the same image with multiple cameras, Brown and Beeghly manage to be wherever they need to be, right when they need to be there. The sound is equally dazzling; the rumble-hiss of the sea has a primal bigness. If film critics' groups didn't insist on ghettoizing nonfiction movies, Liquid would be a lock to win major technical awards.

One could argue that it's impossible for a professional film crew to photograph surfers and not produce amazing images, but even if that's true, what of it? Spectacle for spectacle's sake is not as mindless as it sounds; images have their own poetry, their own meaning. Waves annihilate words, drowning the viewer in sensation and prompting private, cosmic thoughts. In this sense, surfing seems a rare and perfect merger of action and reflection. I bet the Transcendentalists would have dug surfers, or at the very least, surfing movies: Visually, the sport provides a terse, terrific metaphor for peaceful and spiritual interaction between man and nature. It's also a metaphor for the resourceful person's ability to confront fate head-on and literally ride out whatever it throws at you.