Speed Racer

Seeing that it has been a while since anybody updated BUGS, I'll attempt a kick-start.

Speed Racer the movie was very recently released in the cinemas, and I managed to catch it not too long ago. I wasn't too keen on it at first. I've watched the original Speed Racer cartoon before (yes, I'm old) and it wasn't particularly exciting, so I wasn't expecting anything more from the movie this time around. Also, I had serious doubts of how the movie producers could take a theme like Speed Racer and effectively put it on the big screen. After all, Speed Racer wasn't known for its depth or storyline (read: there weren't any).


What I didn't realise is that Speed Racer the movie is produced Wachowski Brothers, the duo who created The Matrix Trilogy. The end result?


Quite a brilliant piece of cinematography. If you read reviews on this movie, you'll find that it wasn't very well received. Most critics gave it a mediocre score. I'm here to drop my 2 cents on what I thought about it.

I'd say, if you were to rate Speed Racer by its depth of its storyline, it'd probably fare quite badly. In all honesty, I would give it a one. Out of ten. It lacks character development. It lacks a proper storyline. It lacks the human touch.

Probably more than half the film is the result of computer-generated imagery. Half the audience in the hall I was in actually laughed in the few opening scenes because the CGI was taken to the extremes - the colour palette was brighter and more colourful than a bag of jellybeans and the law of physics was as chaotic as a monkey stampede. All these could be a very potent recipe for disaster. Could. Because the Wachowski Brothers managed to pull it off.

As cheesy as it sounds, Speed Racer was pretty engaging. What made it so odd, also made it special. The effects were funky. The action was fast-paced. The cast was solid.

The movie is not for everyone, that's for sure. It's quite unlike anything I've seen before. From a pure cinematography standpoint, Speed Racer is amazing. The same can't be said about the storyline. But that doesn't mean the movie is not engrossing. It has a very strange way of catching your attention, and it doesn't let loose of it easily.

If you're looking for a serious, intellectual movie to catch - avoid Speed Racer at all cost. You'll find nothing like that there. However, if you wouldn't mind being dragged into a bizarre world of physics-defying cars and incredibly saturated colours, check Speed Racer out.