MOVIE REVIEW : Exhilarating Trip in ‘Race the Wind’

Greg MacGillivray and Beverly Baroff’s “Race the Wind,” at the Imax Theater in Exposition Park, surveys the history of man’s unceasing efforts to coax more speed from wind and unfolds against magnificent seascapes (and a few landscapes as well) projected on the immense Imax screen.

From the tall ships, today beautiful relics of the past, to windsurfers; from experimental crafts so fragile they disintegrate from the impact of a four-foot wave to land yachts speeding across the Nevada desert at more than 90 m.p.h., MacGillivray and Baroff invite us to experience sailing on them all--and even to participate in several America’s Cup Races--with an in the driver’s seat sense of immediacy so glorious you have can almost smell the sea and feel the ocean spray.

For confirmed landlubbers, “Race the Wind” is informative in a most entertaining way. We learn that in the constant struggle to create ever speedier craft the computer has become indispensable, both in design and later when the vessels are under sail. Yet the film suggests that in ship design, science still does not outweigh art.

Bringing a human dimension to the 39-minute film is Tristan Jones, a veteran mariner whose own great-grandfather set the North American sailing record of 14 days in 1872. (He has sailed the Atlantic solo nine times and circumnavigated the globe three times.) The most exhilarating portions of “Race the Wind”(Times-rated Family) are aboard Jones’ sturdy, weathered one-man Quiberon, while listening to him speak of his love of the sea. Indeed, it is to a large extent due to his presence that the film attains its goal of conveying to us the sailor’s sense of oneness with nature.