What Did I Think?

I know I shouldn’t let reviews bother me. I know I should like what I like and forget about the critical consensus, because it’s at times pretty arbitrary. And for the most part, I do! If I’m interested at all in a movie, I’ll watch it and form my own opinion. But, this one bothered me. This one felt personal.

As I explained in my introduction to this whole Wachowskis rewatch, when I first saw Speed Racer I was weeks away from graduating high school, just a few months shy of moving six hours away from my family to attend college. I saw the movie with my eight-year-old brother knowing full well that it was one of the last times we would hang out together for many months. He was blown away by the bright colors, fast cars, and the silly monkey. I was awed by all of that, too… with maybe the exception of the monkey… but I was also very moved by the depiction of Speed’s relationship with his older brother Rex, who he idolized, and his younger brother Spritle, who he often views as a distraction.

The movie deftly balances its corporations-are-evil race-fixing plot with a more subtle storyline about Speed coming to terms with his brother’s death, trying to navigate a fine line between honoring his brother’s memory and making a name for himself in the world of racing.

This is never more evident than in the film’s opening Thunderhead race, a time-hopping, gravity-defying sequence that quickly establishes Speed’s love for his older brother, his relationship with Trixie, the family’s sense of loss when a horrific crash appears to take Rex’s life, all in service of heightening the deep emotional stakes for the race. It’s dizzying, dazzling, shimmering and stunning; in short, it’s exactly the kind of mesmerizing scene you want from an action movie geared toward kids.

You can get a sense of this scene’s style in the clip below, although it goes on for longer than this:

There’s one short scene in that mix that shows Rex leaving the family home as accusations of cheating and corruption start to pile up. “Can I come with you, Rex?” a young Speed asks, literally looking up to his brother. Rex turns him down. Minutes later, Rex is dead. The scene is echoed later in the film as Speed himself decides it’s time to strike out on his own, as Spritle asks in the same hopeful, idolizing tone of voice, “Can I come with you, Speed?” Like his older brother before him, Speed denies the youngster’s request to tag along.

Spritle has a tendency to show up at inopportune moments…

How many times had I told my little brother that I didn’t want him along, that I wanted some time alone? Had I made up for it with the few times I had indulged him in a game of “cars and blocks,” a deceptively intricate game he liked to play multiple times a week? He’d spread bags and bags of Legos, Duplos, building blocks and K’nex across the living room floor, constructing racetracks and cities, and then he’d follow it up with a Rubbermaid trunk full of Hotwheels cars. The cars all had backstories and personalities, rivalries and love lives and varying senses of humor. He’d play for hours, racing the cars around the block-city, getting them into squabbles with each other, making up, crashing and careening around the living room in ways only a little kid can, seeing an entire world spread before out him.

I played sometimes, sure. But the game of cars and blocks became too complex for me. I didn’t know the characters, and he and my sister would be frustrated when, controlled by me, they acted in ways that defied their established histories. I’d find myself launching my car over the edge of what I’d thought was a racetrack mogul, only to find my brother staring at me in consternation, because I’d crushed what he had just explained were the spectator stands. Eventually, I stopped playing, frustrated that I wasn’t having any fun, because I had forgotten how to indulge him and play along. I was headed off to college, after all. I had far more exciting things than this to concern myself with. Like, classes, and textbooks. I was headed out to the “real world.”

And then Speed Racer came along. For my brother and me, Speed Racer was a movie-length game of cars and blocks, one we could both enjoy together. We could lose ourselves in the dazzling cinematography, a cinematic language of imagination that he, as a kid, intuitively understood, but which I had completely forgotten. Speed Racer is what cars and blocks looked like to him. Speed Racer taught me how to see through his eyes again, to remember what the world was like when it was full of something new and exciting every single day.

On a technical level, the movie is a marvel. Yes, as all of the reviews say, it’s largely entirely computer-generated. But why does that mean it’s bad? An actual camera, constrained to a physical location and a real-life racetrack, would never have been able to capture shots like the .gif above. The Wachowskis, once again, developed an entirely new technology that allowed them to film in ways that had never been seen before. They use the language of video games and cartoons, anime and kung-fu, to tell the story of a family banding together to lift up one of their own and support him in whatever he does.