What they're saying about 'First Descent'

If the sites we perused are any indication, the Mountain Dew-underwritten snowboarding movie First Descent serves as a great window into the branded entertainment conundrum. Even though Mountain Dew is, in fact, a favored beverage among the film’s target audience, and among snowboarders, for the brand to finance a movie about snowboarding—in exchange, of course, for multiple product placement opps for the brand—is viewed definitively as a sellout for everyone else involved; most self-respecting critics seem incapable of writing about the movie without taking a swipe at the brand, and that’s probably not the outcome the marketing people at PepsiCo wanted.