Why you Missed the Point if you Dismissed Speed Racer as Childish.
Note: This is an observation not a review of the movie. There are some parts that some may consider spoilers.
Admittedly I was sceptical about watching Speed Racer. Would it be like so many cliche kids' films? Irrelevant to my interests, gapping plot holes, uninspiring dialogue and corny action. The Wachowski brothers seem to have taken these cliches that are set in our heads and they play with them.
It's too easy to just say the Wachowski's are poor filmmakers, that they didn't realize that they were making a corny film. Maybe you might say they were lax because of Speed Racer, being a kids film. I have another idea.
I think that they wanted to tell a story about how past effects the present. More specifically how you shouldn't dismiss childhood beliefs and fantasies as irrelevant, because they matter and they make who you are today. After all, they're making a remake of an old intellectual property.
The first race, Speed (Emile Hirsch) is racing to beat the track record his deceased brother Rex (Scott Porter) set. Speed chooses to not beat Rex's best time, when he clearly could of. Speed is effected by the past, his childhood. As he battles to not become corrupt from a racing world controlled by greed, the movie unfolds and we realize all Speeds' choices are related to his childhood. For example, when young Speed is in class near the beginning of the movie. Speed imagines he is racing a cartoon car. This image is very childish and most see it as a kid with a big imagination. Later near the films climax we realize that what looked like a kid in dreamland has become a realization of a life goal, he is doing the same thing, on a bigger scale. Throughout the film Speed is asking himself, why does he race. His family helps guide him to the realization that he races because, thats what he has always loved as a kid. Its kind of like a fate thing.
It's actually very meta how I came to notice the films moral. One of my friends stopped paying attention near the beginning of the movie because it was ,in less words, childish. I think the film turned out to be good. So, ironically he failed to see the moral, Don't dismiss something because it looks or seems childish, because your childhood is very important to who you are or at least, who you could be.
Alright, so I like this one, "Why you Missed the Point." It's a catchy title, kind of like the ones that you see on news broadcasts, like in Family Guy (this is the only one I remember as of now), "What Grinds My Gears." [lol]I think you should make more of these kind of things; with different movies or songs, etc..
ReplyDeleteSo about this movie. First of all, I would totally agree with you on the part where you said that you didn't want to watch this movie; you thought it would be really childish! Man! Do you remember my first reaction when you guys told me what movie you borrowed? Speed Racer. Speed Racer?! What the heck? you know! I thought it was totally ridiculous and I wasn't too thrilled in watching it. But as an excuse from doing homework, I decided to.
I see what you mean by the past effecting the present in this movie. That "theme" is very evident in this movie. "Speed chooses to not beat Rex's best time, when he clearly could of." I would say that Speed was more so worried about what the future will hold for him if he were to beat his brother's record. Who will he look up to anymore? You know, it's like having a constant role model and when you are as good as that person, what then happens? It was kind of like the realization for him that he can be as great as his brother, even better. His past ties into it too somehow, how he remembers how much he really loved to think about racing when he was a child. Maybe he was thinking 'why am I doing this again?' by the middle of the movie. It became more of a 'let's do it for the crowd' kind of thing. I don't know, but I also think that maybe Speed was still giving Rex that title of #1 because Speed was in denial that he Could be better than his brother. Maybe because of the fact that Rex died also scared him, and also he didn't want to take the title away from his older brother, his role model. It's like he's my older brother, he is supposed to be #1, but he died?