A documentary by Chris Malloy. Unrated. Opens Friday, July 15, at the Vancity Theatre

“It’s not an adventure until everything goes wrong.” That’s one of the many deadpan homilies delivered by Yvon Chouinard, one of two climbers, ecologists, and business tycoons who inspired and inform this peripatetic documentary. The other is Doug Tompkins, who founded the North Face clothing company while Chouinard created Patagonia—most appropriately, since that last is the real and spiritual destination of 180 ° South.

In the film, the grizzled veterans are already in the southernmost part of Chile, living part-time in a huge preserve they aim to protect from encroaching resource plunderers. Their principal visitor, and the character we follow from California, is one Jeff Johnson, a bearded adrenaline junkie usually found climbing, surfing, and/or skateboarding his way from one wild place to the next.

He’s less adept at sailing, however, and the boat on which he hitches a ride ends up limping its way to Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island. His version of things going wrong, it must be said, includes two months in Polynesia hanging out with a comely surfer and folksinger called Makohe and studying how those famously big-headed people screwed up.

She travels on with Johnson, filmmaker Chris Malloy, and miraculously nimble cinematographer Danny Moder—who also wrote the journals that Johnson reads with a notable lack of passion. The film’s stunning variety of camera angles and richly coloured visuals sometimes include animation, and all are supported, perhaps even smothered, by sensitive folk songs. The final climb, of an ice-sheeted mountain that Tompkins conquered in 1968 (as seen in archival footage), is anticlimactic. And the various talkers get glib at times. But the stellar images of a vanishing world speak for themselves.

Watch the trailer for 180° South.