All.I.Can is the two year film project from Sherpas Cinema that everyone has been eagerly anticipating. Is it any good though? It’s already got rave reviews, and has won Best Feature-Length Mountain Film at the Banff Mountain Film Festival 2011. We’re not so sure though.

This movie is about seventy minutes long, which is a good length for a ski movie, and it has some eye-watering footage of some amazing lines in it. No question, but it does also take 11 minutes and 22 seconds for the view to see someone ski! That’s one seventh of the movie! The opening sequence is a variety of earth time lapse shots, starting off from lava pouring into the ocean to numerous heli-cam shots of pollution and general city life. This is where it all goes wrong. They have tried to release a powerful film about our environmental impact on the world whilst delivering an amazing ski movie. Sadly, they’ve got the balance completely wrong.

Let’s start with the good; there is amazing footage from Greenland, the Canadian Rockies, Alaska, Chile, Greenland, and more. Additionally, they thought up of creative ways of getting amazing shots at different angles, such as the zip line camera through the trees. However, the music doesn’t quite match the skiing for the first half of the movie and really lets it down in parts. I kept wishing to myself that the music was different, that it would be more high tempo to match the pace and difficulty of the skiing.

With regards to the skiing, Kye Petersen once again proves what an amazing skier he is, and he just doesn’t seem to stop surprising us by casually throwing huge 7’s off cliffs whilst skiing steep terrain. It is also good to see that for the majority of the film they access their lines via ski touring or even horseback. This is always great to see not only because of the environmental benefit but because it allows the viewers to imagine that they too could be skiing the same lines this winter.

Nonetheless, one of my favourite parts of the film was an inspirational piece on Mary, 75, and Bud who have been skiing year after year. It was good to see that despite age, if you have enough love and devotion to a pastime you can still ski knee deep powder with speed and style.

The film is mainly focused on big mountain but there is one ingenious urban segment with JP Auclair where he does a run from the top of a village to the bottom, doing backflips over roads, nailing rails and hitting big 7s over people’s washing.  This is arguably one of the other highlights of the movie and helps demonstrate the creativity within All.I.Can.

Despite all this many will jump to the fact that this film is, by its very nature, hypocritical, and Sherpas Cinema do their best to answer that within the film. Whether their answer is good enough or not is debateable but at least they’ve attempted at answering it.

Finally, despite all the great things about this film; the condescending tone of the environmental time lapses coupled with the speeches from skiers of how we need to make a change whilst they carry on flying tens of thousands of miles a year seems a bit bizarre. They can make a change, they just choose not to because they enjoy their lifestyle and I don’t blame them. I would act the same if I were fortunate enough to be in their shoes. My issue is that they expect all of us to change, or to think about change whilst not actually doing anything constructive themselves. And that is why I just can’t love this film, even though I want to. If you can look past the preaching hypocrisy, then definitely watch it. Just skip the first ten minutes and enjoy an hour long of amazing ski footage.