Resurface

He booked a wave. Then he planned to go home and use the gun.

The Netflix trailer for Resurface does not hide the plot. A veteran says he went to Iraq and came back a different person. He talks about firefights and dead bodies. He says he has been on just about every drug on the market. He figured he would be okay with dying. Surfing was the biggest thing on his bucket list. "I was gonna go surfing, go home, and commit suicide." When he caught that wave, he says, it was not death and destruction and hell. The ocean was the one place he could go for peace. Netflix posted that two-minute clip on 15 August 2017. latestnetflix.com's view is that the short itself landed on the service on 1 September.Title ID 80184055.,

TMDB dates a U.S. Release 23 April 2017 and clocks the film at 27 minutes. Wikipedia and Netflix both use 1 September. Runtime listings wobble between 26 and 27 minutes. Common Sense Media calls it 27. The San Luis Obispo International Film Festival screened it on 18 March 2017, months before the streamer homepage. Travis Gibson at the San Luis Obispo Tribune described the opening. Marine Corps veteran Bobby Lane stands on the sand at Avila Beach and points at the Pacific. "I died in that spot and I was reborn a different person," Lane said. "Just straight out is where I caught my first wave. That's the day that the Bobby you are talking to now came alive." Lane had two traumatic brain injuries after his platoon was hit by five roadside bombs.,,,

Joshua Izenberg, who had already made the short Slomo, directed with Wynn Padula. Netflix's notes name the other half of the story. After years of nightmares, depression, and seizures, Lane met Van Curaza, a former big-wave surfer who founded Operation Surf and put veterans in the water for a week at a time. The film also follows a cousin program, the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation. Eddie Strait at the Daily Dot, writing days after the Netflix drop, put Lane as the through-line. Lane takes a battery of pills to get through the day. Op Surf's goal is to get veterans out of their own heads and onto a single task. Strait saw vets missing limbs, and a man who is blind and deaf, catching waves. The people running the program, he wrote, know surfing is not a cure-all. Wallace J. Nichols, Martin Pollock, Mike Shurley, and Sean Meyer share the credits with Lane and Curaza.,,

Twenty-seven minutes, and a classroom waiver.

Common Sense Media flagged the frank parts for age 14 and up. Veterans talk of suicide attempts, of sticking guns in their mouths. One veteran and his wife discuss PTSD, violent outbursts, and road rage. One man tries to put into words taking a child's life in battle. Frequent "fuck," mostly from one vet. A fifth of whiskey and a case of beer to sleep. A passing Viagra mention in a medication list. The 22-veterans-a-day suicide figure, cited in the film from a 2013 Department of Veterans Affairs study, sits over the whole running time. Netflix still posts a grant of permission for one-time educational screenings, as long as nobody charges admission or slaps a Netflix logo on the flyer. That is the afterlife of a short that never pretended to be a feature. Izenberg told the Tribune they wanted people looking past pills and talk therapy. The trailer already said the rest.,,