Film Friday: Speed Racer (2008)

You may, or may not, have heard of a little bomb called Speed Racer. Directed by the Wachowski “brothers,” this film is a live version of the 1960’s Japanese cartoon of the same name. This film lost $27 million of its $120 million investment and it was widely panned by critics. But I’m gonna tell you, I like this film. What the critics hated about the film is that they couldn’t relate to it. Why couldn’t they relate to it? Because it’s an un-cynical film aimed at young boys.

** spoiler alert **

Plot

Speed Racer follows Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch), a teenage Formula One racer. Speed drives the Mach 5, a white Formula One car with some special features. The car is owned by Racer Motors, which is an independent racing company owned by Speed’s parents Pops (John Goodman) and Mom (Susan Sarandon). Speed has a girlfriend named Trixie (Christina Ricci) and a little brother named Spritle, who happens to have a monkey. Speed is also possibly the best racer ever, but he’s not quite there yet because he still lives in the shadow of his older brother, Rex Racer, who died after standing up to race fixers. . . his name was smeared in the process too.

The plot of this one is simple. Speed is an excellent driver. He’s so good that he’s caught the eye of E.P. Arnold Royalton, owner of Royalton Industries, an evil conglomerate which dominates the racing world. Royalton sees racing as being only about money, whereas Speed sees it as being about glory and challenging yourself. When Speed rejects an offer to sell out to Royalton, Royalton sets out to destroy Speed. He even tries to have speed killed in the Casa Cristo 5000, a notoriously violent off-road race. Helping Speed is a mysterious figure called Racer X (Matthew Fox), who appeared right after Rex died and who drives exactly like Rex used to. wink wink

Over the course of a few races and the attempt by Royalton to get Speed to sell his soul, the story revolves around questions of honor, integrity, money versus sportsmanship, race fixing, cheating, and the importance of families. Naturally, the movie comes down to a final race between Speed and a childhood hero who is exposed as rotten, with Royalton’s company, Racer Motors, Rex’s reputation, and Speed’s life all on the line.

Just Kick Back And Enjoy It

Oh, where to begin. . . let me start by saying that in a technical sense, this movie is positively brilliant and it achieves its purpose perfectly. The idea is to take a rather stylized cartoon and turn it into a live action film without losing the spirit of the cartoon, but simultaneously creating a movie worth watching. The film does that perfectly. In fact, this is easily one of the best adaptations of a cartoon on film. Not only does this movie capture the heart and soul of the original, but it manages to bring the cartoon’s stylized ways to real life actors. This is the movie Dick Tracy wished it had been.

The film also wants to pull you into a totally unreal world and make it real for you. The film achieves that too. Indeed, this film is a virtual assault of color and sound and action. It’s so overpowering to your rational mind that it literally forces you to accept its reality. Its scenery is beautiful too, as are the sets. These are the kinds of locations you wish could be real so that you could live there. Additionally, the action is just stylized enough to feel real, yet unreal enough that your mind never doubts the physics of what you see because you know the physics are only suggestive. This allows the races to be exciting rather than boring because the cars achieve all kinds of interesting stunts that would never work in real life, but which you can accept because you understand this isn’t meant to be real.

Sounds great, right? So what’s the problem?

Well, that depends on who you ask. According to the liberal critics, the problem with this film is that it has “nothing of interest to anyone over the age of 10.” They also described the film as having an “undreamed of level of narrative incoherence.” In other words, they didn’t get it. Conservative critics attacked the film for being anti-capitalist. This is all wrong.

What’s going on here is that the critics couldn’t relate to the movie. They are cynics, and they are politicized to boot. Thus, a film that is entirely lacking in cynicism offends them. They cannot relate to a world where the good guy wears a white helmet and stands for loyalty, family and sportsmanship. They need corruption and anguish, which they mistake for drama. To them, the idea that a hero would have no flaws is just anathema.

Moreover, let’s be honest, most film critics are not really nice people. They make a living off of trying to be “bitchy.” So the idea of a feel-good film offends them – think of the last feel-good film they didn’t pan. Even worse, center that feel-good film around traditional male values, which are disdained in the media culture, and you have a film which is easy for these bitchy-boys to hate. To them, Speed Racer is the family friendly version of 300, a film which Roger Ebert dismissed because all the actors had muscles and they were “fascists.” They don’t like Hollywood putting out films with these kinds of messages where people are loyal, where young men are unapologetic heroes, and where sports and competition are seen as a worthy pursuits in and of themselves. Their world is the world of Friday Night Lights, where abusive coaches milk athletes for all they are worth for cynical reasons as the young heroes struggle against a fate that has doomed them to a life of despair... or the world of The Devil Wears Prada where vile hags snipe at each other as Roger Ebert touches himself.

At its core, Speed Racer is a true feel good story. Every time someone good is challenged, they overcome that challenge with the strength of their character and the help of their friends. These people are struggling to make a better world, a less cynical world free of rigged races, where races are raced for the thrill of the challenge to prove your own skill and mettle, not to make a quick buck or to try to live up to the abusive demands of failed parents. And Speed’s family is loving to the point of being downright corny. And you know what? It’s great to see that. These people are all capable, decent people without the slightest hint of an evil side, and that makes them easy to like. . . unless you’re a jaded media-type.

What about the complaint that the film is anti-capitalism? Give me a break. The villain is Royalton Industries, a conglomerate and a monopolist. Monopolies are not capitalism in action, they are the same thing as government power. Moreover, like most monopolists, this one got there by rigging races, cheating investors, and sabotaging competitors. They use connections with the government and threats of frivolous legal action and flat-out cheating to maintain their power against the nimble small business Racer Motors, which cleans their monopolist clocks. Royalton represents anti-competition, and his defeat is more an ode to free markets and competition than anything anti-business.

So here’s the bottom line. This film is not Citizen Cane. It’s not deep. It’s not nuanced. It’s not complex. It’s not Star Wars and won’t spark an entirely new genre. But this film deserves a second chance. Turn out the lights, put it on the biggest screen in your house, put all your cynicism aside, and just enjoy this film for what it is – it’s a film about a young man in an amazingly frenetic and flashy world who wants to make the world a better place. That make him a real hero.

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Film Friday: The Matrix (1999)

By any measure, The Matrix is easily one of the greatest science fiction films ever made. It’s a thrilling action movie, which brought in half a billion dollars. It has a great story with jaw dropping twists and turns. It's presented with an incredible sense of style and innovative special effects. And, most importantly, it takes several science fiction themes to the next level, creating one of the philosophically deepest films on record.

** heavy spoiler alert **

Directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski (Bound), The Matrix is a mind-trip that takes place in a world where machines have enslaved the human race and the human race doesn’t know it. The film can be enjoyed either as a simple rousing action flick or as an intelligent science fiction film with almost limitless depth.

The Matrix As An Action Flick

The Matrix is the story of Thomas Anderson, aka Neo (Keanu Reeves), a computer hacker who feels that something is wrong with the world, something he can’t put his finger on. Through a series of seemingly impossible events, Neo is contacted by a shadowy man named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), who offers him a choice: go back to his life or see the real world. Neo chooses reality, and discovers that he’s been living his entire life in a computer simulation. He learns that in the real world, humans fought a war against an artificial intelligence they created, and lost. Now the remaining free humans hide in a city called Zion near the earth’s core, from which they continue to fight against the machines. The rest of humanity, the vast majority, live unaware in the virtual world created by the machines, as their bodies act as batteries for the machines. According to Morpheus, Neo is prophesized as “the One” who will end the war and free humanity.

The Matrix excels as an action flick. It’s stylishly shot with a strong techno soundtrack and totally hip costuming. The fight scenes are incredibly well choreographed, taking wire fighting to new highs, and it introduces “bullet time” effects, where the scene appears to freeze as the camera rotates around live action. The acting is solid, the dialog is almost-noir but packed with meaning, and there is significant character growth throughout the movie, but never at the expense of the pacing. And the story is clever and exciting. All of this combines in The Matrix to create some truly unique and iconic images, moments and characters. Thus, like most great films (like Star Wars and Close Encounters), The Matrix has inspired much (see, e.g. Inception), but it’s essentially been impossible to copy.

Based on this alone, The Matrix is well worth seeing. But this isn’t all it offers.

The Matrix As Ultra-Intelligent Science Fiction

Beyond the action, The Matrix becomes an extremely intelligent science fiction film. Most science fiction films address only one theme, and usually, the whole film revolves around revealing that theme, like a twist. The Matrix forswears that formula and instead mixes multiple themes, which it then approaches from new perspectives.

The main theme of the The Matrix is an old philosophical/religious question: free will versus predetermination. Free will is shown through Neo, who makes many choices. He must choose to see reality instead of the false reality he lives. He must choose to accept the role of savior. He must choose to stand and fight. And he must choose to believe reality will bend to his will. Even after he has made these choices, he still only has the power to free people if they choose to believe him, i.e. they have free will too. Indeed, the film ends with him telling the machines that he’s going to give humanity a choice.

But is free will an illusion? On the side of predetermination, the movie presents the Oracle and Morpheus (references to Ancient Greece), who see Neo as a prophesized “the One” who will end the war and free man from the machines. Neo objects to the idea of predetermined fates, but every move he makes seems foretold. Thus, it would seem The Matrix believes in predetermination. But wait, the Oracle herself casts doubt on this when she points out that he could be causing his own destiny simply by knowing it: “Would you really have knocked over that vase if I hadn’t mentioned it first?” Moreover, she manipulates Neo by lying to him to get him to act in predetermined ways. . . but then, he does act in predetermined ways.

While this battle rages, the film explores another common science fiction theme: man versus machine, but it does so in much greater depth than this issue normally gets. Science fiction often deals with machines turning on their creators, everything from intelligent computers, like Skynet and HAL, to killer robots in I, Robot. But beyond the shock of the machines rising up, there isn’t usually much more to these stories. The Matrix, by comparison, takes this as a mere starting point and then adds layers of depth from there. Thus, for example, in The Matrix, mankind doesn’t even know its been conquered, which is a rare take on this theme. Also, the machines are not as unified as they seem, as rogue programs like the Oracle help Neo and as the machines begin to lose control over Agent Smith, as he develops a blinding hate for humanity. Moreover, we’re told the machines aren’t all bad because they recognize they are dependent on humans, and they actually tried to make the matrix into a paradise. . . only, the humans wouldn’t accept the programming -- raising questions both of the nature of the human psych and whether a gilded cage is still a cage? These are all aspects that are rarely, if ever, seen in stories dealing with this theme.

What’s more, the man versus machine theme gets brought into the film’s other big theme: perception versus reality. This again is a common theme in science fiction and usually is enough to occupy an entire movie. Indeed, when this theme is used, typically the entire plot will center around the discovery near the end of the film that reality isn’t want it used to be. The Matrix goes deeper. It lets Neo in on the secret early in the film. Then it sets about asking questions that have almost never, if ever, been asked: (1) would you want to know about the real world if you were happy with your perceived world, (2) could you live happily knowing the world you perceive is fake, (3) at what point does perception become reality (if everyone thinks this is how chicken tastes, does that make it so), and (4) if our perceived reality is merely implanted in our minds, can we manipulate it?

The Matrix weaves these themes and questions together into one story, in which Neo must decide to break with the reality he knows so he can fulfill a prophecy and thereby set mankind free from a prison they don’t even know exists.

Adding even more depth and flavor to the exploration of these themes, The Matrix calls upon a treatise in philosophy and religion to inform its characters. For example, a large portion of The Matrix is a Christian allegory, complete with dozens of Biblical references, with Neo playing the role of Christ, as the savior of humanity if only mankind truly believes in him. At the same time, the film tosses in elements of a half dozen other religions like the Buddhist child bending the nonexistent spoon, plus philosophical concepts like Rene Descartes’ evil genius (a faulty argument for why God must exist), and more recognizable references to things like “Alice in Wonderland.” Indeed, this movie is exquisitely made with no single object, name, word or image appearing in the film by chance.

Finally, let me say a word on the ending. Roger Ebert (and others) criticized the movie because he viewed it as a “letdown” that a movie about “redefining the nature of reality” would end in a shootout. But he’s missing the point. The shootout is not the ending. The ending comes when Neo finally realizes that he need not obey the physical laws of reality. Thus, he need not dodge bullets, he can will them to stop. It is his triumph over perception that gives him his victory, not fancy shooting on his part. And thereby, Neo proves man’s superiority to the machines, as our minds can do something the machines cannot -- they cannot imagine outside the bounds of reality -- and he fulfills his destiny through the exercise of free will.

This is why The Matrix is a great film. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

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