Is ‘Mountains on the Moon’ Our Generation’s ‘Koyaanisqatsi’?

The public streaming release of artist-skier Chris Benchetler’s new film, Mountains on the Moon, brings to mind Jerry Garcia’s famous description of the Grateful Dead’s unique appeal and fanbase: “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”

The new film is a beautiful — if somewhat meandering — meditation on the inter-connectedness of the world and the unseen links between action sports, life and all living things. Running just under an hour, it features some of the world’s top adventure sports athletes skiing, snowboarding, climbing, biking and surfing in the darkness of night in stunning outdoor settings illuminated by lasers, colorful lights and projection mapping. The athletes perform in custom outfits with glowing skeleton bones — representing our shared inner humanity, natch — that radiate psychedelic light as they move.

The entire soundtrack, a film character all its own, is provided by the Grateful Dead, while the narration — environmental-metaphysics-themed spoken word poetry about the connectivity of all life forms — is provided by author and mycologist Paul Stamets, who sounds a bit like The Doors’ Jim Morrison might if he were alive to sing about about a ‘shrooms-inspired philosophy of existence.

If you’re thinking this sounds like a cinematic mashup of the X Games, Yoda’s definition of the Force in The Empire Strikes Back and a Bill Ham liquid light show at a Grateful Dead concert, you’re starting to get the picture of what Benchetler is trying to do here — and who will most enjoy it. Going back to the Garcia quote, if you like listening to the Dead while jibbing at the snow terrain park, you will really like, if not love, this movie and stream it repeatedly. If licorice isn’t your thing, however, the film may be a bit much, despite Benchetler’s engaging creativity.

Now streaming on demand on Amazon Prime, Mountains on the Moon is Benchetler’s second significant film. His first, Fire on the Mountain, was a shorter film covering similar terrain, featuring athletes in glowing light suits engaging in action sports. That film was narrated by basketball great Bill Walton, known as perhaps the biggest Deadhead of them all — and not only because of his gangly 7-foot frame.

Walton, like Benchetler, was a true believer in the Dead’s music and culture and often celebrated the band’s commitment to improvisation and innovation. The new film is dedicated to Walton’s memory, along with that of alpinist Michael Gardner. It is the second recent sports-and-Grateful-Dead film dedicated to Walton, following ESPN’s 2024 documentary, Rhythm Masters: A Mickey Hart Experience.

Hart, the iconoclastic drummer and percussionist for the Dead, makes an appearance in Mountains on the Moon that would have made Walton proud. Midway through the film, Hart finds himself in the middle of the night atop a custom 70-foot ice-and-snow sculpture shaped like a woolly mammoth on Mammoth Mountain in California’s Eastern Sierra. Much as he did during the free-form “Drums > Space” interludes of live Grateful Dead concerts, Hart bangs away on his custom circular drum set, conjuring the rhythms of life.

In Benchetler’s version, skiers and snowboarders literally leap over Hart and his drum set as he plays. The ski ramps are adorned with colorful artwork, including the skull and lightning bolt that have long defined the Dead’s visual vocabulary. It’s probably the film’s most striking scene, in part because Hart, now in his early 80s, seems to fully embrace the absolute creative insanity of it all.

Before arriving on Amazon Prime Video, Benchetler presented Mountains on the Moon at select theaters around the country, mostly in ski towns and mountain communities on the West Coast and in Colorado. Many screenings featured a live band performing the film’s score, composed of roughly ten classic Dead songs.

Unlike the theatrical version, however, the streaming release includes an engaging 20-minute behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film. It shows how the collective of designers, digital experts, filmmakers and production specialists Benchetler assembled brought the artist-skier’s expansive vision to life. The segment is a master class in the challenges of turning the ideas of an artistic visionary into reality.

A key figure in the behind-the-scenes segment is David Lemieux, the Dead’s longtime archivist and one of the band’s authoritative voices. Explaining how Hart became involved in such a crazy production, Lemieux says simply of Benchetler: “Chris is a member of the family.”

And in many ways, Mountains on the Moon is as much about the Dead — its music, visual world and ongoing impact on American culture — as it is about Benchetler’s creative vision, if such a divide even exists. The film starts with fantastic cartoon imagery themed to the band’s 60th anniversary (Benchetler designed the official 60th anniversary logo) and the movie arrives as the last of the commemorations of the band’s six decades of impact are winding down. As a result, the film feels like a timely digital manifestation of the Grateful Dead universe to date. It is both a creatively brilliant tribute and, given its timing, a work that implicitly raises important questions about the future of the band’s legacy.

At the film’s San Francisco premiere in early October, the live score was performed by the Terrapin Family Band, a collective that got its start at Terrapin Crossroads, a former Marin County restaurant and performance space owned by Dead co-founder Phil Lesh. Grahame Lesh, Phil’s son and a member of the band, played an understated role during the screening of Benshetler’s film: saying nothing, staying focused on playing music and keeping the spotlight on the film.

A month earlier, however, Grahame and members of the same band had played a high-profile free concert in Golden Gate Park celebrating an exhibition featuring Ken Kesey’s famous Merry Prankster bus Furthur which was back in San Francisco for the first time in more than 50 years. The bus, of course, has deep connections to the Dead’s history. And the last time a Lesh played free music in Golden Gate Park with the Furthur bus nearby was January 1967, at the Human Be-In, where the Dead performed at an event that, for better or worse, helped usher in San Francisco’s well-documented Summer of Love era.

The Be-In also represented something of a handoff of the creative anti-establishment baton from the Beats and Pranksters to the Haight-Ashbury hippies. The rest is colorful — and much debated — history. Benchetler’s film is now available to everyone at a moment when many are asking who, beyond Hart, now 83, will or can carry the baton of the Grateful Dead’s unique spirit and move its legacy forward. With the passing of founding member Bobby Weir earlier this year and Dead & Company’s John Mayer announcing that the bus had “dropped him off” for now, the band’s on-going legacy has reached a pivotal moment.

Sure, scores of Dead tribute and cover bands — including Grahame Lesh’s own — will keep the Dead’s musical legacy alive and introduce it to new, licorice-liking audiences. But it may also fall to creative artist-skiers like Benchetler, and wildly innovative films like Mountains on the Moon, to ensure that the long, strange trip in all its colorful iterations continues — and the music never stops.