Here is a fun fact about me: I was not always known as a novelist. For the first fifteen years of my professional writing life, in fact, I was best known as a critic, and most prominently a film critic. My first job out of college was reviewing films for the Fresno Bee newspaper in California. My life consisted of watching every film that came into town and then telling people what I thought about them. As you might expect from an attention-seeking twentysomething, being paid to offer my opinions about popular culture was, well, very much my thing.
After working for the Bee I would later do film reviews for the Official PlayStation Magazine (the PS2 had the capability to play CDs and DVDs, so they needed a reviewer for music and film, and I did both). After that, I wrote a column on science fiction film for several years on AMC’s website. And in 2005, the same year Old Man’s War came out, my book The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies hit shelves. A second book on science fiction film, 24 Frames Into the Future, followed in 2012.
I dig my current job, but I also still love watching, thinking, and writing about film. So when Uncanny approached me about writing for them this year, I asked if I could write about movies. Not hot take reviews of the latest films (although maybe I’ll do that here and there), but thoughts about science fiction and fantasy cinema in general, and/or catching up with the recent-ish movies I’ve loved in the field and explaining why they’ve made an impression on me, and might even be important to the field overall.
With that as the remit, let me begin by sharing one of my favorite science fiction films of the last fifteen years:
Speed Racer.
Even five years ago, I think this declaration would have been met with some eye-rolling and a bit of derision. Which I get! When the movie came out in 2008, I was a bit derisive of it myself. I did not get why Lana and Lilly Wachowski, who could have done anything after the hugely financially successful Matrixseries, chose to push all their credibility chips onto a live action version of a beloved-but-better-in-memory 60s anime about a racecar driver and his family. It felt like reaching for a nostalgia play that would only work for a narrow slice of Elder Gen-Xers. This was especially puzzling, as the marketing for it at the time was positioning it for families, the younger members of which would have no attachment to the property.
In other words, I was looking at it purely as a business play, not in terms of what could be done with this particular set of toys, pushed through the (literal) lens of the Wachowskis. In that sense, I was not wrong: Speed Racer came in third place at the box office on its opening weekend, behind Iron Man (which you will probably remember) and What Happens in Vegas (which you may not). Ultimately, it grossed less than $100 million globally, off a $120 million budget. It was a financial flop. A really big one.
The thing about time, particularly as it relates to genre film, is that it heals all financial wounds. The horse-race business aspect of film fades and what you’re left with is the art, or lack thereof.
Few people now remember that Blade Runner was a dud at the 1982 box office or that its reputational resurrection happened with a slow build of home video sales and cinematic re-releases; they know it now as arguably the most influential science fiction movie since 2001.
In the case of Speed Racer, the box office mishap is no longer relevant and the art that is left is extremely interesting. To be clear, this film remains, in many ways, a real hot mess, as so many of the Wachowski films are. But time has shown “real hot mess” to be a feature of the Wachowski work, not a bug. Beyond that, for the cinematic world of 2008, Speed Racer ended up being an intriguing test bed for a lot of cinematic practice and technology that, for better or worse, is used in cinema today.
The Wachowskis didn’t bring Speed Racer to Warner Bros.; the property had been kicking around the studio since the 1990s, when Johnny Depp was slated to play Speed and California punk godfather Henry Rollins the mysterious Racer X. By the time the Wachowskis came to it, it had undergone several iterations. What the Wachowskis saw in the Speed Racer was a chance to change things up a bit: All their movies to that point, either written or directed, had been R-rated affairs. Speed, clocking in with a PG rating, was intended to be aimed at families.
But just because Warner Bros. was aiming at families didn’t mean the Wachowskis were planning to water down their visual and technical presentation. Quite the opposite, in fact: “Every generation experiences aesthetic death, and when you really assault an aesthetic, people freak out,” Lana Wachowski said in 2012. “But we said that kids are okay with aesthetic change.”
In other words, what the Wachowskis wanted to say with Speed Racer was, hey kids, watch this!
This much is evident from the eye-popping fifteen-minute opening sequence of the film, which is an absolute masterpiece of digital editing. The Wachowskis (and editors Zach Staenberg and Roger Barton) clearly weren’t the first to use digital editing in their cinematic storytelling, but they were clearly fully exploiting what the technology could do in a way not often seen in mainstream film up that point.
The Wachowskis, who wrote the script, had an hour’s worth of worldbuilding, character development, family dynamics, and plot all as backstory, and jammed it all into those fifteen minutes with breakneck editing and screen wipes, all while blasting one of the most delirious car racing sequences in the history of film directly into the face of its viewers—and I do mean directly; the first scene of Speed’s opening car race has the famous Mach 5, and every other car, zooming toward the viewer at eye level.
It’s a lot: A lot of visuals, a lot of information, a lot of action, a lot of story. This is not Michael Bay-style quick-jump editing that ramps up tension by cutting the imagery into chaos. The images hold the screen long enough to be registered, and the wipes, zooms, and angles are all considered choices to jam information into your brain, not to excuse the lack of it. The editing, almost impossibly, makes it coherent… when you stop fighting it (if you’re an adult, that is; the Wachowskis might have been right that the younger generation wouldn’t question the choices and would just drink it all in).
The opening sequence also establishes something else: The world of Speed Racer is a world of artifice. Colors are saturated to the point of candy coating; even the blacks and dark blues have a velvet deepness to them. The racecars, and the race tracks they run on, see physics as more of a guideline than a rule. The good guys have only enough flaws to move the plot along, and the bad guys (see: Roger Allam as a shouty industrialist) gnaw through scenery like they’re starving. This world does not run on dream logic, but the logic it runs on isn’t something that makes sense in a real world. This is a “live action” movie only by courtesy, and not only because it was one of the first really big movies to be shot almost entirely on green screen with the world painted in later. Everything is heightened; it’s not just the colors that are saturated here.
It’s best to say that Speed Racer’s world exists in a space between its instigating anime source and the sort of “dark and gritty” pop culture adaptations that were in vogue at the time, most memorably The Dark Knight, which shared the summer with Speed Racer, and leaning far more toward the former than the latter. These logic-defying semi-anime spaces were not unknown to the Wachowskis, of course; the two Matrix sequels were basically a $300 million two-part anime with live actors in them, and the later Jupiter Ascending barely even bothered to tether itself to reality.
I would argue, however, that Speed Racer is the height of this particular form, both for the Wachowskis and for cinema to date. Other “in-between” films have been made, both for adults (Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come; Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City) and for kids (The Spy Kids films, with Robert Rodriguez again), but not on the same scale, or with, at least initially, the same level of studio support.
The film also introduces several Wachowski hallmarks to a younger audience. First and foremost is the Wachowski interest in families, found and otherwise: the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar in the Matrix films, the “sensates” of Sense8, and here families that have more traditional structures, on both sides of the hero/villain line (the film, not surprisingly for a 2008 “family film,” does not lean into gender or sexual fluidity that is common in other Wachowski work). Coming along with that is a theme of destiny; Speed Racer is “the one” like Neo is in The Matrix or Jupiter Jones in Jupiter Ascending, and like them he has to fumble through some missteps to get to who he is meant to become, in Speed’s case culminating in, of course, that final big race.
The (financially) fatal flaw in the Wachowski’s thesis about kids and aesthetics is that while kids may be open to the visual and narrative adventurousness the siblings put out in the film, it’s the adults who actually have the money, and in 2008, they weren’t buying it. This is one major reason, I suspect, that Speed Racer’s reputation has only improved over time: The kids got to see it at home, and for a generation raised on modern-day anime and the cinematic visual overload that later filmmakers, ironically, borrowed from the Wachowskis, Speed Racer made perfectly good sense.
Here in 2023, 15 years after its release, Speed Racer is one of my science fiction comfort watches. I appreciate its technical innovation and acumen, I enjoy the much muchness of its story and acting, and my eyes dig its aesthetic. And whenever some part of my brain is begging to nitpick that nothing in the film makes sense in the real world, I just remind myself that every single thing in the film is absolutely reasonable, if you posit that every single person in it is plugged into the Matrix. Is this not a perfect world for that? Yes. Yes, it is.
© 2023 John Scalzi
