'Speed Racer': preview

Ben Walters marvels at the visual magic of ‘Speed Racer’, the kinetic new film from ‘The Matrix’ directors

Nestled among the bright colours and fast manoeuvres of the upcoming ‘Speed Racer’ are some photos of a zebra, glimpsed in the background of a virtual racetrack at which souped-up cars do eye-popping battle. Easily missed, these images of the black-and-whitest of animals are described by the directors, Andy and Larry Wachowski, as a tribute to Eadweard Muybridge, the nineteenth-century photographer known for his split-second sequences showing how animals’ bodies move. What would the makers of the ‘Matrix’ films and this supercharged anime adaptation have to thank a figure like Muybridge for? The answer harks back to the birth of cinema and might hold the key to its future: simple fascination with objects in motion.

‘Speed Racer’ is a big-screen version of a 1960s Japanese animated series. Like the cartoon, the movie features the Racer family – and a story involving family pride and competitive achievement. There is a plot of sorts, but if the filmmakers expect us to keep up with the minutiae of its corporate skulduggery, or to put much emotional stock in the characters, they’re kidding themselves. They probably don’t.

‘Speed Racer’ is less about thinking than feeling. The Wachowkis’ first film since the ‘Matrix’ trilogy is less interested in narrative or psychological engagement than in delivering the thrill of colour and movement – the movement of cars, to be precise, which here take on the aerobatic qualities of skateboards or snowboards, and meet in 400mph mid-air clashes as intricate and impossible as anything in ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. (The Wachowskis call these grapples ‘car fu’.) ‘Racing,’ says Speed, played by Emile Hirsch, is ‘like a religion’ for his family and the picture is, in its way, a transcendental experience. The climactic race dissolves into an ecstatic, expressionistic kaleidoscope that feels less like ‘Days of Thunder’ and more like the ‘stargate’ sequence of ‘2001’, and leaves our hero panting in his cockpit in post-orgasmic exhaustion.

Racing has never been filmed like this – and, of course, it hasn’t been filmed like this for ‘Speed Racer’. The film inhabits a virtual world, a computer-generated environment in which the image roams free from the rules of conventional photography. Multiple planes of vision remain in crisp focus. Long, single shots swoop from stadium overviews into the cockpits of one car after another. Such control over three-dimensional space is an extrapolation of the ‘bullet time’ effect developed for ‘The Matrix’, an effect expanded for the ‘Matrix’ sequels’ car chases and echoed in neo-hot-rod films like ‘The Fast and the Furious’. But the effect is also directly descended from Muybridge’s photographs: freezing their subjects in motion and mid-air.

In the first wave of CGI – roughly from ‘Terminator 2’ to ‘The Lord of the Rings’ cycle – filmmakers created virtual objects with real-world credibility. It seemed that if you were standing on the set of ‘Jurassic Park’, say, you’d see those raptors yourself. They were pseudo-photographic. But now, movies present fantasy worlds where light and physicality work on terms different to our own. We could never stand on the set of films such as ‘Sin City’ or ‘300’; the unnatural, pop-pastel, neo-neon palette of ‘Speed Racer’ offers not just rainbow-like explosions but amazingly garish lawns.

Predicated on virtual exoticism rather than imitation of the real, these films are post-photographic. This is cinema after the camera. But its shifts are not just technological. It is a spectacular form for a spectacular age, one that privileges a rich environment and episodic, mythic storytelling. It is a comic-book look with a video-game feel, and little interest in attributes we commonly associate with quality cinema: sustained narrative, plausible characters, sophisticated dialogue.

Accordingly, these films don’t get no respect. Certainly, a failed mythic story runs a high risk of camp, especially if, as in ‘300’ or ‘Beowulf’, your wardrobe consists of capes and codpieces. But there is an argument to be made that visceral sensation and audio-visual immersion are more cinematic than character or plot; that those ‘quality’ attributes associated with filmmaking should be left to novels. The earliest motion pictures inspired more awe than sympathy. We might find the medium’s uniqueness where it overwhelms us.

I’m playing devil’s advocate a little – I won’t be boycotting narrative cinema any time soon – but there is a practical side to all this. At a time when film’s commercial fortunes are uncertain, these movies offer a model of cinema that robustly answers the challenge of home entertainment. It’s no coincidence that such pictures do well when screened in the Imax format; or that concert films are proving a good match with Imax too; or that a major renaissance in 3D filmmaking will begin later this year. Post-photographic, post-narrative pictures play by different rules, but their rules might prove better suited to modern cultural and economic imperatives. Their pleasures might be superficial but that is not the same as trivial, and as the costs of technology fall there’s no telling what more provocative minds might do with such an approach.

‘Speed Racer’ opens on May 9, with a simultaneous release at Imax cinemas.

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