Is this JJ Abram’s big return to prominence? Or is it a five car pile-up waiting to happen?
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: After losing his older brother in a fatal racing wreck, a just out of high school Speed Racer attempts to pick up where his bro left off.
About: As Mr. Crawford informed me, this 1994 draft was intended to be directed by Julien Temple, with a pre-Amber Heard Johnny Depp starring. It was deemed too expensive to produce. Alfonso Cuaron was attached to direct in 1997 but that didn’t work either. The Wachowskis would develop a different script and shoot that back in 2005. The movie did not do well and Speed Racer was quickly forgotten. But JJ never let go of his love for the property and has decided almost 30 years later to turn it into a TV show for Apple. What’s his vision for that show? I assume it’s something akin to his feature treatment, which we’re going to look at today.
Writer: JJ Abrams
Details: 126 pages
I am so torn by what I’m about to experience.
I love JJ.
I hate anime.
JJ. Anime. Anime. JJ.
Even as a kid, when you have zero storytelling discernment – if it’s flashing colors, you’re happy – even as a KID I watched this show and thought it was nonsensical. You can’t turn something nonsensical into a movie and expect good things. You need a base. You need a story. To this day, Speed Racer will be known as the movie that officially slammed the coffin shut on the Wachowskis being considered serious filmmakers.
Is JJ about to make that same mistake? Or has he cracked the code for making live-action anime actually good?
The year is the 50s. We watch as a young man named Rex Racer is racing in a high-stakes race where the tracks are long and weird and have jumps over mountains and stuff. During a particularly difficult section of the track, Rex crashes and DIES! The entire Racer family, including his younger brother Speed, are devastated.
Cut to 12 years later and Speed is now 18. All he wants to do is race but his family is still so devastated by Rex’s death that they don’t even talk about racing. Speed graduates high school and watches, longingly, as his crush, Trixie, heads to London to enter into helicopter school.
Speed finally gets the courage to ask his father if he can race because racing is in his blood and his father shocks him when he takes him to a remote garage and introduces him to the car he’s been building over the last decade. The Mach 5!!! Speed is so excited that he wants to race this weekend. But you haven’t even practiced, his father says. Speed proves that he can handle professional racing by easily beating the lap record at the local speedway.
Just as he’s about to race, he’s cornered by the mysterious Racer-X, who always wears a tinted visor. Racer-X says to him, “Don’t race,” in a very sinister manner. But Speed doesn’t listen, races, and finishes second to Racer-X, which turns him into an overnight superstar, due in no small part to being the younger brother of the deceased Rex.
The next race is a big one and it’s in England! Which means, guess what? He’s going to see Trixie! Except now that he’s a big popular racer, all the women want him, including the seductive Tatiana, who puts all her cards on the table and says she wants to “get naked” with him ASAP.
During the race, Speed realizes that the big time is a lot bigger than he thought. The race is way tougher. And during it, out of nowhere, a giant tree lands in the middle of the speedway and Speed crashes and his car catches fire. To everyone’s shock, Racer-X slams to a stop and runs over to save Speed (BIG SPOILER). When he lifts his helmet momentarily, it’s revealed that Racer-X is actually…. REX! His brother!
But how can this be!?? Later that night, Rex secretly informs Speed that there are higher powers fixing these races, which is why he tried to warn him off them. If you don’t play by the rules, they make you disappear. Is Speed going to give up? Or is he going to keep racing? Something tells me you can’t keep Speedy in the corner. And that both him and his brother are going to rule the racing world together!
Word on the street is that the development process for this project has been agonizingly slow. And I can see why. There are certain tones that have virtually no wiggle room. When you have, say, a romantic comedy, you can develop something that’s goofy, like The Lost City, or romantic, like Love Actually.
But with this… you need to nail a very specific type of humor along with porting what was meant to be animation into live-action, which is a whole other ball of wax that requires an adjustment so sensitive, it’s like trying to land a 747 on a runway the width of a balance beam.
Look no further than Cowboy Bebop to see how quickly things can go south.
With that said, JJ wins again.
This isn’t a great script. But what JJ is really good at, at least as a screenwriter, is telling a simple story well. Which is the foundation of screenwriting. You’re not trying to tell a complex story well. But a simple story. Which is what this is. It’s a kid whose brother died racing but he still wants to be a racer. And that’s it. He races and the races are all fun because they have a bunch of fun wacky car setups.
However, I understand that saying, “He tells a story well” is a vague statement that helps no one. So let me give you an example of what I mean. At the beginning of the second act, Speed reveals to his father that he dreams of being a race car driver, like his brother. So his father gives him his first racing car. Speed then says, “I want to race in the big race this weekend.”
Now most screenwriters would’ve just cut to the race. That’s what this movie is about right? A guy who’s a racer. Let’s put him in races! But the smart screenwriter understands that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for someone to race when they’ve never even practiced before. In these scenarios, YOU MUST MAKE YOUR HERO EARN IT.
So Speed says to his dad, if I can beat the lap record at the local speedway, can I race? And his dad says sure because, “that’s impossible.” Of course, Speed Racer does the impossible and sets the record. This is standard good storytelling. You can’t hand your hero anything. Make them earn it. Especially if they’re making a big leap in the script.
I also liked the big twist (SPOILERS FOLLOW). I’m not familiar with the Speed Racer show so I don’t know if this was JJ’s idea or not. But I loved that Racer-X turned out to be the dead brother. That moment jolted me out of an appreciate reading malaise and turned the script into something I actually wanted to finish.
Because now I could tell the writer actually cared. They thought about the story. Most writers will just kill off the brother in that opening scene to create sympathy. They don’t think beyond: I NEED TO MAKE MY HERO SYMPATHETIC. To bring that storyline back in a powerful way conveys a way higher desire to tell an enjoyable story.
I think I have a better idea of Speed Racer after this script. I always thought of it is as random weird anime. But now I realize it’s like the car version of Inspector Gadget. The cars can do all these fun things and there’s this deeper sci-fi spy story involved. It’s still going to be a hell of a tightrope to walk tone-wise. But if JJ is heavily involved and doesn’t leave it to one of these dime-a-dozen showrunners, I think it might actually be good. And that’s something I was not expecting to say going into this review.
Screenplay Link: Speed Racer
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The correction of “who” to “whom” is used in a dialogue scene in Speed Racer. You know what? Never use the word “whom.” Between the years 1993 and 1999, everybody was obsessed with the difference between the word “who” and “whom.” It became such an obsession that it began appearing in numerous movie dialogues, including films as big as The Phantom Menace. To this day, these silly debates have rattled, mobilized, and confused people to feel passionately about this debate yet I am here to tell you that “whom” is a stupid word that nobody who isn’t trying to sound pretentious uses and you can literally use “who” in its place every time and no one will care. I’m glad we can all agree on this.
