SPEED RACER HOW TO
SPEED RACER MOVIE
SPEED RACER SERIES

Michael Giacchino’s score lends the film so much of its propulsion, and here it shifts gears (sorry) into what feels like a choral mass on top of skittering strings. When he drifts, the course markings swirl around him like eddies of dust, and when he maneuvers a spinning leap into the air, he twirls in front of a mass of lens flares. David Tattersall’s cinematography begins to recall the inside of an arcade, as the world behind Speed blurs into neon streaks of yellow, blue, and red.

Speed Racer then visualizes the idea by abstracting the world around Speed as he charges forward. Speed realizes that while the sport itself might be corrupt, his love for it isn’t, and through that love he can achieve greatness. “That night, something just clicked,” Pops says. Racer X says, “You don’t climb into a T-180 to be a driver, you do it because you’re driven,” while Royalton tells him to “put away your toys and grow up.” The emotional peak of the moment comes after Pops reminds Speed of back when he was a kid and they watched a famous race together, which Royalton has since revealed was rigged. As Speed hits the gas and begins catching up to his competitors, the film cuts to flashbacks of supporting characters soliloquizing their perspectives at him.

SPEED RACER HOW TO

The final sequence picks up as Speed slows down and figures out how to restart his engine: by closing his eyes and activating his main character abilities. Our hero maneuvers the hook in front of a camera, revealing Royalton’s plot to the world, but his car breaks down mid-race. After a few twists and turns, he makes it back into the Grand Prix, where most of the other racers have of course been bought off and are trying to kill him.ĭuring the race, one of those competitors spear hooks Speed. Speed becomes disillusioned with the sport, but stages a comeback with the help of the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox). A delightfully slimy Roger Allam as the head of Royalton then brags to Speed Racer about how most of the races are fixed to make him more money. Early in the movie, the obviously evil conglomerate Royalton Industries offers Speed Racer a sponsorship deal, but he turns them down. Speed idolizes his older brother Rex Racer (Scott Porter), who died in a mysterious accident during a race his parents Mom Racer (Susan Sarandon) and Pops Racer (John Goodman) nevertheless support his racing dreams despite their loss. From a very young age, Speed Racer has loved driving, the most popular sport in the Speed Racer universe which operates on enormous, roller-coaster-like courses according to Mario Kart-style rules. You can appreciate this moment without knowing much about it, but here is some context on the beautifully convoluted plot of Speed Racer. Nowhere is that clearer than in Speed Racer’s go-for-broke climactic sequence, in which the film’s hero (literally named Speed Racer, played by Emile Hirsch) embraces his love of racing with such full-bodied abandon that it breaks open the reality of the film, and he accelerates into glorious abstraction.

SPEED RACER SERIES

After the groundbreaking success of The Matrix and its baffling but brilliant follow-ups The Matrix: Reloaded and Revolutions, Lana and Lilly Wachowski decided to adapt the Japanese anime series Speed Racer into a deeply-earnest, embarrassingly-on-the-nose-pun-filled American blockbuster that’s as much about the complicated concept of speed racing as it is about the very idea of filmed spectacle.

SPEED RACER MOVIE

The answer is a movie that came just before our modern era of blockbusters, which so wholeheartedly embraced the aesthetic possibilities of CGI that audiences pretty much instantly rejected it: 2008’s Speed Racer. What happens when you put the artifice at the forefront?

But what’s striking is how rarely big, CGI-happy movies ever tip their hand to that fact of their design. I’m not here to pretend that movies have ever tried to be fully real, or ever should. Even a modest enough whodunnit like Death on the Nile invites the suspicion that so much of the Nile has been filled thanks to green screen work. Superheroes fight video game-style bosses and close giant portals in the sky awash in the gray-ish lighting of warehouse interiors, while actors’ bodies themselves can be smoothed to perfection. Stunt actors may bring a sense of tactile reality to fight- or destruction-heavy set pieces, but the CGI that often overwhelms their presence can impart a sterile, weightless quality. These days, we take it for granted that most live-action big budget movies are, in large part, animated. Head to Vulture’s Twitter to catch the live commentary. This week’s selection comes from writer Jackson McHenry, who will begin his screening of Speed Racer on February 23 at 7 p.m. Every two weeks for the foreseeable future, Vulture will be selecting a film to watch with our readers as part of our Wednesday Night Movie Club.

Speed racer