The first thing which I should probably say is that, being a surfer, I am probably biased in favor of the movie. Anyway, this masterpiece of John Milius is not merely about surf, and whoever disregards this film as a surf movie has not understood it entirely . I consider Big Wednesday a masterpiece for three reasons. First of all, because the camera work is amazing, especially in light of the fact that the film was shot in 1978. If you have seen the movie on TV you have missed out a lot , because the quality of the images deteriorates considerably, so I suggest you watch it in a cinema, although this could prove hard. Secondly, Big Wednesday successfully portrays a generation, with its conflicts and dreams which would eventually become disillusionments. This very fact contributes to elevate the value of the movie, which becomes ( like Easy Rider, for example) an ambassador of an extinct generation to the future generations. Big Wednesday does this in a very elaborate way, since it not only portrays the external behaviour of such generation (hair-style, surfing, music and so forth), but it also displays the internal values of such generation. I believe that every one of you has been, at least to a certain extent, sentimentally touched by the element of cameraderie and male bondage existing in the movie. Finally, I really appreciate the way in which john Milius criticizes the Vietnam War. You have to take into account that John Milius is an all-American director, who-for example- shot Red Dawn, an example of American paranoia of the Red danger. Therefore you cannot expect him to criticize the Vietnam war as vividly as Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now , or as Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket. However, John Milius is honest with us, and does tell us that there was a lot of disillusionment with the Vietnam War, especially among the younger generations. He neither criticizes the behavior of who tried with any means not to be conscripted, nor of who voluntarily enrolled, but he does tell us that the Vietnam war separated friends and families, and disrupted the utopian dreams of a generation. And, at the end of the day, this is the only thing on which everyone, regardless of his or her political beliefs, would agree about a topic as controversial as the Vietnam War.