And the Wachowskis don’t run from that problem: Without the slightest hint of snark or ironic detachment, they make the Racer family’s passionate love for one another-and Speed’s conviction that integrity and bravery can stand up to power and corruption-the heart of the movie. What you get is almost the inverse of the uncanny valley: Real actors seem somehow diminished or out of place in the intense hyperreality of the film. Su única competencia es el recuerdo de su hermano, el que fue su ídolo, el legendario Rex Racer, cuya muerte en una carrera ha dejado una meta que Speed siente la necesidad de cumplir. Es un piloto agresivo, instintivo y, sobre todo, temerario. A number of critics dismissed these performances and characters as cheesy and hollow. Speed Racer es un corredor nato, nacido para pilotar coches de carreras. The interesting problem becomes how real actors-good ones, including Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci as Speed and Trixie, Susan Sarandon and John Goodman as Mom and Pops Racer, and the wooden Matthew Fox perfectly cast as the icy Racer X-fit into this cartoon world. Through a chorus of announcers we learn Rex was eventually disgraced in the racing world-and, in a tragic moment for the Racer family, killed in a wreck during a grueling cross-country race, and it becomes clear Speed’s relationship with his brother is his true motivation in chasing the record. Woven in with that sequence are two other races occurring on the same track in different times: In one, Speed is a child learning to drive while sitting on his older brother Rex’s lap, while in another Rex himself is setting the Thunderhead Raceway record a few years later, as an adolescent Speed cheers from the stands. In the film’s opening sequence, that story pivots around the present of 18-year-old Speed Racer driving the Mach 5 on the Thunderhead Raceway.
What initially may seem like a swirling array of disembodied heads, racecars, and lights actually presents a story with carefully delineated characters. What’s particularly impressive about Speed Racer, though, is that it conveys its own grammar in a non-stop lightning bolt of action and information. “Every generation experiences aesthetic death, and when you really assault an aesthetic, people freak out.” So says Lana Wachowski about the movie, and she’s right.