Troy Hurtibise is a man obsessed. Watching this documentary on him, you can't help but feel he's insane as well (hey, he admits himself that he's crazy). What's so special about this guy that he deserves a documovie on him? Well, it's difficult to explain, but I'll give it a shot.
As a teenager Troy was mauled by a grizzly bear. Ever since then, the man has been obsessed with them, dreaming about them, studying them. praying to them... okay, I made the last one up, but the guy is simply bonkers for bears. His dream and ultimate goal in life is to have a reencounter with a grizzly, and to make sure he's not almost killed again, he's spent a decade and $100,000 designing a suit which will allow him to withstand the attack.
The final result is the Ursus Mach 7, the seventh suit in a series. The real fun in the film is watching Troy impact test the suit using everything from huge battering rams swinging from trees, to being beat up in the parking lot by some biker thugs to shotgun tests (with baloons standing in for Troy... he's crazy not stupid). The other joy is the old filmreels of Ursus Machs 1 through 6 and the experiments he did with them. This segment was too short.
Troy himself is really the only one to speak, save sparse narration. Thankfully, Troy is a very entertaining and charismatic person, and has a quality which translates well on screen making him instantly likeable.
The final twenty minutes take place over 8 days in the woods north of Banff, Alberta, where a month prior a family had been attacked by a grizzly. Troy tests the suit on the terrain and finds his maneuverability to be quite restricted, and he cannot cross the land without falling over (his suit is rather inflexable). During the first 7 days there is no sign of a grizzly, and then the snow falls (signalling that the bears will be heading for hibernation shortly). During the wait, Troy entertains the camera with tales about his first grizzly encounter, a dream he had afterwords, and about the importance of having and knowing how to properly use a knife when in the woods.
On the 8th day, a grizzly is finally spotted, unfortunately though, the 165 pound suit is ten kilometers away, too far away to retrieve, put on and manage the terrain out to the grizzly. He's got to design a more flexable suit.
Probably the most captivating real-life documentary (not reenactment) you will ever watch, director Peter Lynch does a magnificent job in capturing the action, the tension, and the disappointments of Hurtibise and his crew. He does a great job at showing the humour in his subject by throwing in allusions of Robocop, but never mocking Troy himself. While it is disappointing to not actually witnessing the suit's encounter with the bear, Lynch does leave ample opportunity to pick up where he left off, if and when Troy manages to design a better suit and the opportunity to use it.