USA, — Much happens in “Skywalkers: A Love Story” that, sight unseen, might lead you to believe it was a project starring Tom Cruise, The Rock or another Hollywood fixture with blockbuster instincts. Unfathomable heights are scaled in beautiful cities. People fall in love and drift apart and make up. Plans are hatched, authorities are evaded, great odds are embraced with greater confidence. Lives are risked and seat armrests at risk of being clenched tight.
But “Skywalkers” isn’t a fictional action spectacular. It’s a documentary about two real people, Angela and Ivan, so fearless in their exploits of sneaking to the tops of skyscrapers or star-grazing construction cranes – a side hobby-turned-corporate-sponsored-hustle they call “rooftopping” – that we can hardly characterize them as people when they reach their destinations hundreds, even thousands of feet in the air. The wind whips fiercely at the photoshoot-ready dresses they've brought along, and in faces bearing the relaxed smile of someone enjoying a beachside sunset.
Sure, documentary filmmakers have long turned their lens to subjects who get a high off of “finding what lies on the other side of fear,” or some similarly worded pursuit. The best of these movies find the humanity in their daredevils, examining their psychologies or shaping their stories in such a way that we can at least start to understand how they feel so alive by risking death; Angela purports early on that, for her, rooftopping isn’t about adrenaline but self-growth.
Yet it’s all too easy to cast doubt on that philosophy when “Skywalkers” anchors her and Ivan’s endeavors not in some great triumph of the human spirit or life-changing discovery about themselves as mortal souls… but rather the growth of their massive social media followings. What another movie might have used as a detail, “Skywalkers” deploys, at least in its first half, as a dubious narrative and aesthetic canvas that makes clear directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina aren’t all that motivated to find the dimension in the daring.
The result is a movie that starts off feeling far too commercial to reflect the illicit, inexplicable nature of its subjects’ stunts: a constant line of pop-radio hits makes it feel right at home in the Netflix library; requisite montages breeze, uninterested, through family upbringings; carefully manicured narration from Angela and Ivan gives the whole thing the gravity of a high school fling and not the unbelievable epic it is on paper (the title, after all, does invoke a certain heavyweight pop culture franchise).
To be sure: Watching the duo climb up, up, further up until they’ve reached what can only be called Tom Cruising altitude tightens your stomach, sequences of dumbfounding bravery that stand in stark contrast to the ultrapolished footage that will eventually be posted online to cash in on likes. Usually shown in grainy, death-defying perspective, these bits are remarkable, and offer the most piercing looks at the vulnerability that must be confronted when Angela experiences a crisis of faith later in the movie, amid a tighter focus and elevated stakes. It’s what makes “Skywalkers” worth catching in IMAX if you plan on seeing it at all.
It also makes for a fascinating contrast in filmmaking philosophies. Because this is a story about a most singular kind of self-promoter, we wouldn’t expect to glimpse much in the margins that rises above self-promotion, despite the myriad questions that blossom about their, ah… career. How does the sponsorship stuff work when much about their work is illegal? How do they get paid? Are companies held liable if they’re seriously hurt or arrested? Are we seriously supposed to not scoff when the big payday they’re seeking is a high-priced NFT?
And, naturally: What is there in Angela and Ivan’s story that Angela and Ivan might not want us to see? It feels performative when they go their separate ways after a shouting match on a stormy night, as if the movie really thinks there’s any chance we won’t see them reunite before scaling their highest climb yet – the 118-story Merdeka tower in Malaysia – when the movie’s second half is spent planning for it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t suspect the drama of “Skywalkers” to feel manufactured, even if it goes to great lengths to assure us that the pair’s jaw-dropping skywalking isn’t.
And so there’s a captivating, defining tension here between spectacle and systems; between the medium’s unique ability to show audiences something we couldn’t fathom trying ourselves and this documentary’s insistence on portraying rooftopping as something ultimately to be monetized. Whatever passion is behind Angela and Ivan’s strange career is hard to glimpse even as the movie adopts an intriguing heist-movie formula, and it's far too easy to get lost in the gulf that separates their jerky GoPro footage from flying drone shots that look ripped from travel insurance commercials. “Skywalkers: A Love Story” appears unaware of that dissonance, which might ultimately reveal more about Angela and Ivan than they can see from thousands of feet in the air.
"Skywalkers: A Love Story" is rated R for language. It's now on Netflix and some theaters. Runtime: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
Starring Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus
Directed by Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina
2024
