If a person mentions any movie with the late, great Patrick Swayze in it, a lot of folks are bound to perk up and pay attention. For those of us in the Pacific Northwest, learning that the movie Point Break visited Indian Beach in Ecola State Park, located in Cannon Beach, Oregon, would no doubt be kind of interesting. Granted, the movie was filmed in a few different locations that had little to nothing to do with the PNW, but that one little mention is enough to raise a few eyebrows since any place would be willing to state that they’d played host to anything that had featured the likes of Swayze, Keanu Reeves, and even Gary Busey. But the context of this scene needs to be understood first since those that might not have seen the movie yet might not understand that Bodhi, Swayze’s character, was convinced that a 50-year storm that would create massive swells and killer waves would be hitting Bell’s Beach in Australia. This was going to be Bodhi’s greatest adventure, and as anyone who’s seen the movie will know, it was one that he would face alone.
The Ex-Presidents were a group of surfers that robbed banks to fund their carefree lifestyle of surfing, skydiving, and otherwise living as free of the system as possible. The problem with this was that the FBI was seeking to come down hard on Bodhi and his group, and with the addition of Johnny Utah, played by Reeves, they eventually infiltrated the group and managed to bring them down. But while the movie was an action feature, the surfing was a big enough part of the movie that it became a transcendent element that a lot of people felt was was one of the more notable aspects that people can still recall.
In a lot of movies that deal with surfing, there’s often a quality to the sport that makes it highly appealing for many of those in the audience. The sense of peace, freedom and the overall feeling of being closer to nature is something that grabs many people. There’s much more to surfing than this, but in Point Break, the story was diverse but also focused on freedom in a way that many people don’t fully comprehend. Bodhi, despite being a criminal and less than faithful when it comes to his friends in the end, was still a man that had a goal set firmly in his mind, and it all culminated at Bell’s Beach at the end of the movie. Realizing that this scene took place thousands of miles from the real Bells Beach in Australia, where the terrain is quite a bit different if one is willing to check. That’s the trick of the movies though, as many filmmakers appear confident that a lot of people don’t know one geographic location from another. It’s a fair assumption to be certain since audience members attending a movie aren’t bound to be paying such close attention to the terrain if the movie is convincing enough unless they’ve been to one location or another and know the difference between them. Needless to say, those that are well-traveled aren’t as easy to fool in the movie theater.
Point Break turned out to be one of the many movies that fudged a bit on the environments that it claimed, but it’s fair to state that a lot of fans didn’t really care. To this day it would be interesting to see how many individuals understood that the movie wasn’t filmed in the same location up until the story started to travel. Plenty of moviegoers are simply ready and willing to accept what they see on the screen in terms of background, and because of this, it’s become normal for people to disregard what they see on the screen unless they feel the need to check up on something that might have struck them as odd or interesting. Bell’s Beach is a popular spot to be fair, as is Cannon Beach, but telling the two apart is kind of easy if a person puts pictures of them side by side. But moviegoers aren’t going to be thinking about this most times, which is why people let this kind of thing go.
There’s nothing wrong with staging one place to represent another since it’s done all the time and in the world of movies it’s not that big of a deal unless the differences are incredibly obvious. Point Break was a popular movie for the acting, the locations, and the action that went into it, so it’s not hard to think that people, when asked, would recall much of what they’d seen on the screen. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter so long as the story being told entertains the audience, but it was a fun point to reveal to those that might not have known.