When George Lucas and Steven Spielberg read the Dennis Aaberg- and John Milius-penned screenplay for 1978’s Big Wednesday, they predicted it would be “a big summer blockbuster” — a successor to 1970s-defining summer hits like American Graffiti (1973) and Jaws (1975). Even when pretending not to know that the movie, which Milius also directed, would ultimately flop more than flourish at the box office, it’s surprising that its A-list champions were so confident about its runaway-success potential. Its coming-of-age dramas are too perfunctory to inspire much emotional payoff, and its surfing sequences, while gorgeously shot, skew more pretty than exciting. 

Based on Milius’ own experiences growing up in Malibu, Big Wednesday follows a trio of identically blonde and deeply tanned friends, Matt, Jack, and Leroy (Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt, and Gary Busey), as they age from reckless youths in the early 1960s who live for little more than catching waves and drug and drink into melancholy 30-somethings whose downcast eyes summon the old “youth is wasted on the young” adage. 

A flurry of furniture- and window-wrecking house parties and ill-advised road trips to places like Tijuana, Big Wednesday’s first half is a whirlwind of debauchery — an R-rated version of one of the Beach Party movies. Milius maintains a kinetic energy consonant with the illusory sense of anything-is-possible carefreeness strongest in youth. But that section of the film also feels rather vacant, not because the action within it is — there is, unquestionably, merit in seeking fun — but because Matt, Jack, and Leroy are too much outlines of characters to grow very attached to. 

The cast of Big Wednesday.

Respectively known in their circle for their tendency to self-destruct, to be the kind of stand-up guy you call in a crisis, and to be daring in a masochistic sort of way, Milius and Aaberg don’t meaningfully expand on their characters’ reputations, and the actors playing them aren’t strong enough to fill the gaps with movie-star charisma. (There is, though, some interesting life-informs-art charge in the casting of Vincent and Busey, who would later be more associated in the public eye with their awful behavior than their work.)

Big Wednesday’s back half is better — when the trio is wondering where the time went and mulling over the Vietnam War’s personal impact. Jack serves. Matt and Leroy wriggle out of the draft with a sham leg injury and a performance of straitjacket-baiting insanity. But they still mourn mutual friends lost in combat. The three remain facilely written in later scenes, but Milius’ evocation of where-did-the-time-go bittersweetness is convincing, making us see the earlier scenes of these men being young and dumb in a new light. It especially bruises when some of Matt’s surfing is highlighted in a The Endless Summer (1967)-style documentary, whose achievement is tainted when a screening he attends with his wife and daughter is packed with incessantly whooping and laughing kids who couldn’t care less about the onscreen narrator’s assertions that Matt’s way of gliding through the water was pioneering for the generation to follow.

The film’s one-last-stand-on-the-waves finale is its first on-the-water sequence that feels high-stakes — it finds the friends daring to zip through an onslaught of mountains-high waves on a beach fringed with pokey reefs — and makes the rolling of the happy ending-following closing credits feel like an exhale. But the way you feel when Big Wednesday ends also bespeaks what’s lacking elsewhere. You’re only really relieved that the seemingly unsurvivable has been survived. It hit me afterward that I was probably supposed to have been more deeply moved to see a full-circle moment happen for characters who hadn’t before been that confident they’d again experience anything like it.