There’s a notable shift in the way the whole film works after you get past the first half-hour or so – basically, as soon as they hit the rally race everything gets wound together, and things don’t start falling apart again until the very end when they have to end the film three or four times to get everything wrapped up. We literally get up the following day and a whole new set of conflicts are introduced – Speed is being courted by big business sponsors, the big business vs individual is set up, and although there’s some real tangential links to the first story it feels like the start of something else entirely (although this, too, is cut short when the seemingly-nice-big-businessmen reveals himself to be corporate-scum-who-hates-individuals at the end of this sequence). We get to a nice point where things are ready to move forward, and…. He makes a decision – not to break his brother’s record in the race, to limit himself from surpassing his brother’s memory. He relived Rex’s departure, sees the effect it has on his family, gets told not to listen to the gossip that follows. The conflict is all established – Speed wants to live up to his older brother’s memory, but also needs to understand why Rex Racer walked out. Speed Racer does this twice, and really this is where a lot of the problems mentioned above become unforgivable – the combination of opening race and story sets up one set of narrative expectations (two, actually, since they cram the background on Trixi and Speed’s relationship in there, rather unnecessarily). The act basically ends at the moment the decision is made to go and deal with the problem. There’s a structure to the first act of a story – the world is established, something threatens the status-quo, the hero walks away from it, things get worse and people keep saying “fix it”, and finally the protagonist is forced to address the issue. This would probably be bearable – not good, but bearable – if it was setting something up, but at the end of the race and the flashback sequence we’re given a new problem…
In SF we call this info-dumping and it’s something to be used with caution, but in the film it’s the very literal equivalent of stopping a story to insert “as you know, Bob, Speed’s older brother was once a great racer himself, but he came to a bad end…” over and over again. All these flashbacks undercut the speed and action of the opening race, but most of them add very little to tension. In the opening ten minutes of the film, we have about six flashbacks. There’s no problem with a story being these things, but it’s never all of these things at the same time – each theme gets set up seperately and independently, taking far to long to integrate. On one hand it’s a personal story about Speed living up to his brother’s legacy, on another it’s a story about the individual against big business, and on another hand its the thematic equivalent of Star Wars where man conquers the machine through the all-knowing power of the force (or, in this case, listening to the car and driving on instinct). But underneath that, on the thematic level, this film is overburdened with themes and it handles none of them particularly well. Not entirely true, since on one level they’ve got this down – Speed Racer is about futuristic cars and remaking a cartoon. Things to pay attention to, when watching Speed Racer as a learning experience:ġ) They Haven’t Decided what the film is about. Which is why I’d probably recommend people who are interested in writing should watch it, if only to see why certain things don’t work, narratively speaking. Sadly, this is coupled with the kind of bone-headed narrative decisions that make it a fairly mundane failure rather than failed attempt at genius. It was never going to be a successful film because the choices they were making ran up against the basic demand for pseudo-realism in cinema, but at the very least it was ambitious and willing to take chances. The Watchowski Brothers remake has a lot going for it in terms of a really strong aesthetic, a willingness to be stylized rather than naturalistic, and a moderately strong cast.
I’ll be honest for a second – Speed Racer should be the kind of glorious failure in the style of films like Southland Tales. As a writer, this is a combination that keeps me looking at something, wondering what the hell happened and why it all falls apart.
#Speed racer 2008 reddit movie#
Not because it’s a good movie – it’s not – but because it’s made by people just smart enough to do interesting things and just dumb enough to make some very simple mistakes.
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