When you think of surfing, certain images spring to mind: Huge, bright blue waves, guys in swim trunks and girls in bikinis riding the tide into a sandy beach, stoners sitting back and comparing the day's waves. Now, take all that imagery, and transport it to a village in Norway, and you get Monster Thursday, a Scandinavian movie as pretty and inconsistent as the tide itself.
The movie starts with a young man, Even, attending the wedding of his friend Tord to the pregnant Karen, whom Even has always loved. Briefly after the wedding, Tord takes off on a business trip to Singapore for a couple of weeks, leaving his new wife in Even's care. Even decides to take the opportunity to win Karen over, and enters a local surfing competition, even though he has no knowledge of the sport. With the help of his friend Beckstrom, meterologist Sara and local surfing guru Skipper, Even gradually starts to grow from a frustrated novice to a shaky but capable wave rider. All this while trying to put the moves on the already taken girl of his dreams.
Director Arild Ostin Ommundsen is to be commended for his attempt to take the usually bright, sunny ideas and archetypes of surfing and transfer it to a landscape that is the polar opposite. In the liner notes of the DVD, Ommundsen states that he wanted to keep the plot and characters usually associated with sports movies like "Rocky" or "The Karate Kid" and make it relevant to Scandanavia, which he manages to do pretty well. Beckstrom, the encouraging best friend character, is a classic second banana: funny, positive and helpful, if somewhat bumbling. Skipper is a typical mentor: driven and encouraging, but with something of a bitter past. Tord, the antagonist of the film, isn't the sneering, cocky expert one might expect to find in movies associated with competition (he's absent for most of the film) but his position provides a good foil for Even, our hero, to work against.
The movie is also beautifully shot. Ommundsen and crew did the most that they could to squeeze every drop of color out of the drab Norwegian landscape. He takes a countryside that consists of various shades of gray, black and blue and somehow manages to make it look appealing. By the end of the movie, I almost wanted to go there myself.
Where Monster Thursday fails, however, and fails spectacularly, is in the storytelling. The plot moves at a snail's pace. The first half of the film seems like a collection of random scenes that barely make sense. I wonder if the relevance between the different dialogue, actions and situations were lost in translation, or the cutting room floor, or if they were even there to begin with. It makes the movie very hard to follow, and harder for the audience to get into the characters presented to us. Karen, the pregnant young wife, seems whiny, indecisive and weak. I had to wonder just what it was about her (other than her looks) that Even found so appealing. The end of the film cuts between the present and the past without warning, so it takes a moment to adjust. The film's end is suitably subtle and visually impressive, with Even riding a huge "monster" wave in the middle of a thunderstorm, but it's a long way to the payoff, such a long way as to wonder whether it was worth the trouble in the first place.