Speed Rac­er and the block­buster sea change

15 years on, 2008 is a fas­ci­nat­ing case study for why movies are the way they are today. The Dark Knight daz­zled crit­ics, made a bil­lion dol­lars world­wide, and didn’t get a Best Pic­ture nom­i­na­tion at the Oscars — increas­ing the nom­i­na­tion slots and vot­ing for more block­busters, the Academy’s been try­ing to make up for the slight ever since. Iron Man explod­ed at the box office, kick­start­ing a fran­chise every major Hol­ly­wood stu­dio has tried to repli­cate, with vary­ing degrees of fail­ure in enter­tain­ment and prof­it. Mean­while, The Wachowskis’ $120 mil­lion movie Speed Rac­er flopped in cin­e­mas, con­fused crit­ics and audi­ences alike, and dis­ap­peared quick­ly from the pub­lic consciousness.

Released on May 9, just a week after Iron Man, Speed Rac­er was met most­ly with con­fu­sion. Crit­ics and audi­ences alike didn’t know what to make of Speed Rac­er, also an IP big-bud­get project, because it was a new and exper­i­men­tal enti­ty – a fam­i­ly movie that was part action, part sport, part teen romance, part kid escapade, part anti-cap­i­tal­ist philo­soph­i­cal text, but also a visu­al rev­o­lu­tion that still feels fresh today. Right from the lit­er­al kalei­do­scope of col­or that opens the movie to the unspool­ing of real­i­ty at the con­clu­sion of the final race, Speed Rac­er was some­thing else entirely.

In tra­di­tion­al ani­ma­tion, sub­jects in motion would be ani­mat­ed on translu­cent cels that were over­laid on paint­ed back­grounds. To repli­cate this style in live action, writer-direc­tors Lana and Lil­ly Wachows­ki shot sep­a­rate images against green screens, which were then com­pos­it­ed togeth­er on 360º bub­bles of back­grounds, cre­at­ing unre­al visu­als where every­thing on screen was equal­ly in-focus, even when it felt like it shouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be too far to com­pare it to the ground­break­ing use of deep focus in Orson Welles’ Cit­i­zen Kane, each an evo­lu­tion of cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage for its time. The result of the Wachowskis’ dig­i­tal image-mak­ing is a high-speed, expres­sion­is­tic form of visu­al sto­ry­telling that aban­dons real­ism for the raw emo­tion­al­i­ty and styl­is­tic imagery of ani­mé – and it works.

With­in these images, cars flip and jump and twist as if they’re Hot Wheels in the hands of chil­dren, mak­ing moves not because they’re real­is­tic, but because they’re the coolest thing you can imag­ine. Ear­ly on, the movie tells you what to expect: a child’s imag­i­na­tion turns the world around him into a race drawn by his cray­on, with rain­bows of col­or and a tun­nel of light. The rest of the movie is its big-bud­get real­iza­tion. And at the end, as our hero zooms and races through blurs of col­or and veloc­i­ty, he tears apart the fab­ric of our real­i­ty and leaps through a blind­ing swirl of check­ers – it’s a cli­max that feels like a rev­e­la­tion — as long as you’re will­ing to trust the journey.

The Wachowskis have nev­er made things too easy for their audi­ences; wall your­self off from try­ing some­thing unex­pect­ed at your own per­il. The open­ing 16 min­utes of Speed Rac­er are a whirl­wind of flash­backs and for­wards, whip pans and zooms, swirling heads and ghosts of the past. But they also teach view­ers how to watch the movie, devel­op­ing a lan­guage of edit­ing that takes inspi­ra­tion from the mul­ti­ple-per­spec­tives-at-once art of cubism. Watch­ing Speed Rac­er is an active expe­ri­ence that requires participation.

On one week­end in May 2008, Speed Rac­er and Iron Man both played in the­aters, offer­ing a choice. Iron Man was con­ven­tion­al, com­fort­able, wit­ty, cool – Speed Rac­er was none of these. It was a work of art cre­at­ed by nerds who loved ani­mé and com­ic books, who had made the Cit­i­zen Kane of 1999 in The Matrix, and like Orson Welles, were doomed to find out how hard it is to fol­low up the great­est movie of your time with some­thing else the pub­lic will appreciate.

There was no way of know­ing back in 2008 what block­buster movies would become now, heav­i­ly reliant on cin­e­mat­ic uni­vers­es and IP-over-artistry film­mak­ing. Mar­vel had bet the farm on a half-bil­lion dol­lar loan from Mer­rill Lynch just nine years after declar­ing bank­rupt­cy. Super­hero movies were not a win­ning busi­ness to be in, and few would have put their mon­ey on Iron Man – an action movie based on an unpop­u­lar super­hero, direct­ed by the guy who made Elf and Zathu­ra and star­ring an only recent­ly post-come­back Robert Downey Jr. – as the film to kick­start a Hol­ly­wood rev­o­lu­tion. Yet here we are.

Speed Rac­er was the Wachowskis’ first post-Matrix project, about a dri­ver who’s very fast and, named, er, Speed Rac­er. But it’s also about the dif­fi­cul­ty of try­ing to be an inde­pen­dent artist in a world that inevitably curves toward cap­i­tal­ist greed and the inter­ests of glob­al con­glom­er­ates. Like the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse, the vil­lain of Speed Rac­er offers treats – E.P. Arnold Roy­al­ton, Esq. offers exot­ic flow­ers and cig­ars, plus a plane full of can­dy – but ulti­mate­ly reveals a desire for same­ness and over­whelm­ing control.

Mar­vel movies, no mat­ter how much artis­tic tal­ent they recruit, have been increas­ing­ly tend­ing towards same­ness. The same third-act vil­lain fights, the same weight­less CG action and cos­tum­ing, and the same murky visu­als that can ruin the work of even the great­est cin­e­matog­ra­phers. They are plagued by under­baked scripts and under­paid visu­al effects artists. Aim­ing for real­ism and achiev­ing bland­ness, these movies invari­ably suck the life out of vibrant source mate­r­i­al. The visu­al­ly gray house style in Mar­vel movies (and Dis­ney live-action remakes) cor­po­ra­tizes and deper­son­al­izes films, mak­ing them all feel like they were approved by the same board­room. It recalls the logo Roy­al­ton offers for his company’s pro­posed part­ner­ship with Speed Rac­er: a copy­right with a copy­right on it.

Iron Man was no indi­ca­tion of the murky future of Hol­ly­wood, just as it couldn’t pre­dict the Mar­vel movie behe­moth that would fol­low. But with­out Iron Man, there is no MCU. Now that we have it, one can’t help but won­der what main­stream cin­e­ma might look like if audi­ences had cho­sen dif­fer­ent­ly in May 2008, and Speed Rac­er became the break­out suc­cess of the year. Is there a rev­o­lu­tion­ary world of cin­e­mat­ic art we missed out on? Or would we be look­ing at a Wachows­ki Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse instead?