Dust to Glory

One of the racers in Dana Brown’s Dust to Glory talks about being covered in dust following the grueling 24-hour off-road race. It gets cake on them, up their noses, in their eyes, in their ears. You could scrape it off them if you wanted to. Dust is harmless in small quantities, but in large doses it can be dangerous when you’re going in upwards of 100 miles per hour in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere. Sentimentality parallels the dust in the film. In small doses it’s cute. However Brown lays it on so much throughout Dust to Glory that it almost brings the whole production down. Luckily there’s lots of tremendous shots and a solid story to keep it going.

Dust to Glory documents the Tecate SCORE Baja 1000. The race takes place in Mexico and runs 1,000 miles nonstop – all of which is off-road. There really are no rules to the Baja 1000. If you’ve got a car and a driver you can enter. You probably won’t finish, but you can try anyway. The track is a mix of trails, dirt roads, cactus patches, abandoned engines and a whole lot of desert. Racers can take shortcuts if they want, they just have to reach the checkpoints. The catch is that none of the checkpoints are given in advance. And for the winner goes a whopping couple thousand dollars.

It’s a pity that Dust to Glory couldn’t have been made for the IMAX. Brown’s style is made for the super-sized format. Like Step Into Liquid, he goes to extremes to get to the action. There’s vehicles chasing the race cars, car-cams, handhelds, interview clips. But no matter what’s happening, the camera’s always moving and, in turn, it gets right to the heart of the action. While it’s great as is, taking it a notch further would make it that much more of a spectacle.

The film is told from a fan’s perspective. Dana Brown’s to be exact. His follow-up to the surfing documentary Step Into Liquid, Dust to Glory is an exciting movie that’s polite to its subject. Too polite. Not that I was expecting or wanting some hard-hitting exposé on the race, but there are many points where Brown inserts his own hero worship into the film’s narrative. He followed a similar route with Step Into Liquid, but I didn’t mind it there because he himself was a part of the group. This time around he was simply a filmmaker and wasn’t one of the boys – at least in the context of the film. The tremendous action shots and personable stories show that Brown deeply respects the race and the racers. He doesn’t have to say it outright.

Another sign of Brown getting too close to the subject matter is the inclusion of a lot of characters. While many have great stories to tell, it becomes hard to keep up with them all. And while some are distinguishable, others get lost in the mix. More than once I got mixed up with who was the bike racers, who drove the trucks, who was behind the wheel of the vintage Beetle and who was changing the tires of the souped-up Class I.

Despite my misgivings, it’s hard not to like Dust to Glory. Even with its faults, it captures the essence of what it is to risk one’s life in a race that means little more than a small taste of glory. But in that glory comes passion, excitement and the things that makes life grand. Let the corny Full House music rise, wipe away a tear and get revved up for all the dust clouds and car flips that come with it.