Without further context, one could be forgiven for conflating Skywalkers: A Love Story with yet another Star Wars spinoff. Donning the Jedi’s patronymic and draped with a subtitle reminiscent of a legacy franchise brewing its nostalgic strains, this documentary, directed by Jeff Zimbalist (with a co-director’s credit to Maria Bukhonina), nonetheless has all the pomp of a galactic space opera but little of its profuse romance. The pomp in question stems almost solely from its subject matter: daredevils, specifically the ones who illegally ascend tall structures, but this time around exonerated as artists painting on the sky’s canvas their death-defying, attention-seeking message. Such “skywalkers,” or rooftoppers, have met with both increasing veneration and vitriol; notwithstanding the risk of falling, unsecured, to certain gruesome death, authorities have largely dealt with them as public nuisances, and, in turn, these public nuisances have factored the criminality of their trespassing into a broader equation of thrills, sponsorships, and social media clout. Under the ever-monetizable attention economy of Instagram and TikTok, all that juts out is sacred.
Ironic, then, for Skywalkers to falter on this front; as a document chronicling the stunts and exploits of rooftopping couple Angela Nikolau and Vanya Beerkus, it glazes over its visuals and plot points, an autopilot endeavor through the content mill mistaking speed for kineticism. Angela is a Russian blogger and trained gymnast; Vanya one of the leading rooftoppers in the world. Not keen to be excluded from this male-dominated arena, Angela turns from a mere enthusiast into full-scale professional, teaming up with Vanya to conquer the new heights of China, France, and wherever skyscrapers stick their heads above the clouds. The theme behind their claim to fame (and correspondingly the film’s) is, unsurprisingly, love — after Vanya risks prison time to be with Angela (they were both released after one night), she declares herself to have fallen for him. The hook? Love on the zenith of skywalking, atop the needle-like spire of Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118, the world’s second-tallest building (118 floors, 678.9 meters) after the Burj Khalifa.
If this sounds gimmicky, that’s because Skywalkers very much is, swaddling its runtime with heaps of brash action while padding its form using the scantiest of motives. There’s a feigned objectivity to the proceedings, most deviously insinuated by a roving camera (in sequences not featuring drone footage or B-roll) and only ever addressed (and vaguely so) once when Vanya tells the operator to stop filming amid a quarrel with Angela. This stylistic feint itself wouldn’t matter, and if it did then half the documentaries ever made would have to tender their resignation document and repent for eternity. Rather, what marks Skywalkers is just how surprisingly boring it is. In the advent of films such as James Marsh’s Man on Wire or Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Free Solo, one has seen the spectacular and is less enamored by it tout court than by its making. But the making of Angela and Vanya is no different than the countless YouTube vlogs made by themselves and others, and the film consequently no more than a prestige attempt at self-promotion. Little about the characters is truly gleaned apart from paper-thin platitudes; even less about the dynamism of this burgeoning corner of adrenaline junkies (to add insult, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is mentioned only to explain the couple’s retreat to Thailand, and their adoption of NFTs as a livelihood is not unlike a marketing plug in its own right). As both an unfurling of the intimacy between two particular individuals and a broader ode to those who live on the literal edge, Skywalkers neglects to furnish genuine insight; one could watch its final half hour, featuring the couple’s daring climb to the top of Merdeka 118, and be content with the thrills of dodging security and exhausting willpower. The rest of the project is a victim of its own spectacle.
DIRECTOR: Jeff Zimbalist & Maria Bukhonina; CAST: Angela Nikolau, Ivan Beerkus; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: July 12; STREAMING: July 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
