Every time someone is in trouble, their car just flies or spins to gain speed, which defies the common sense kids have established. It’s much like that dreadful new He-Man cartoon from a few years back.
#Speed racer 2008 screenshots movie#
The movie has no plot, no characterization, nothing beyond bright colors.Įven in cartoons kids love, like Naruto, there’s a basic logic the premise adheres to. Kids know when someone is talking down to them and that’s why Speed Racer failed so spectacularly. It falls victim to the trapping of all the worst kid movies, the movie is made with the assumption kids are stupid and if you distract them with enough bright colors and cut scenes, they won’t notice their intelligence is being insulted. I saw the movie and I can tell you where the hate comes from. Maybe it’s just my ADD talking, but this movie was like a shot of Adderall…it made me feel peaceful and happy. Perhaps there is one good side to the perceived failure of SPEED RACER: if more little kids saw it, there would be a high chance of an epidemic of epilepsy. My guess is that they really were trying to make a kid-friendly blockbuster instead they’ve made something crazy and idiosyncratic that will go down as a big $100 million+ stinker. In the meantime, I fear the Wachowskis will be left in the Hollywood wilderness. I think SPEED RACER will have a long life on DVD, and will in time, like Robert Altman’s Popeye before it, become accepted as something that succeeds on its own terms. Anne Thompson rounds up more of the scorn, but is a bit more sympathetic overall. Sure the story is predictable…but so was IRON MAN’s. In a world where CGI explosions and digital farting animals are just casually dismissed as the expected mediocrity, here’s a movie that tries to be different and ups the ante significantly. Over at Nikki Finke, its paltry $20 mil this weekend is rightly seen as a blow to Warners, but the comments are a Newsarama-level beat down. It isn’t subtle, but it supplies all the narrative drive the day-glo racing needs.īut the level of opprobrium being laid on this movie is hard to fathom. The characters are always telling each other how they feel in no uncertain terms. SPEED RACER captures the rhythms of manga - the sentimentality and emotional overdrive. If you don’t like Susan Sarandon when she’s making peanut butter sandwiches for an all-night family chassis-welding party, you have no heart. The only way to make a successful CGI movie is to keep the actors in the foreground, and keep them likable. Most everyone complains that the acting is flat, but I think that’s beside the point. When it isn’t racing around the track, the story is mostly told through big, big close-ups of the actors. And yeah, if you have motion sickness or are prone to seizures, it will probably kill you.
#Speed racer 2008 screenshots plus#
Yes, it was exhausting - the intensity is too much for a two-hour plus movie. Cars don’t just race, they race through tunnels, not just tunnels, but tunnels animated with racing zebras. Deserts are searing orange clouds, fireworks are purple neon. Backgrounds explode into plastic and chrome speedlines, cars leap and bounce. The visual style is like nothing ever seen before, a mash-up of Tron, Blade Runner and Gran Turismo but taken to a new degree of kinetic flair. The Wachowskis, who both directed and wrote the kid-friendly film, have created a world with its own thrilling, topsy turvy logic.