Back when he cut the title-screen track for Madden 2000, Ludacris aptly summed up the appeal of video games: “What you want? The rock in the palm of my hand. What you got? I got John Madden.” When it comes to skilled narrative product placement, video games have one unsurprisingly tragic flaw that a lot of our other IP-based subgenres don’t: A competing audiovisual experience that offers, as Luda pointed out, a more potent and immediate fulfillment of whatever the film’s core fantasy is. I made a similar distinction a few weeks back when writing about Barbie, about the nature of the lore and platform-based toy adaptation, and I think the same holds here. If you want to make a hyper-successful video game movie or show, you’re going to have to find a property that is well-suited to the narrative: The things that people love about The Last of Us aren’t necessarily exclusive to the video games – the characters, the story, the thrills. Sure, it’s all a little more immediate on a PC or console (one often unremarked aspect about these adaptations is that they add in a voyeuristic perspective when the best games lack it, often making players complicit in the character’s actions), but the core appeal remains. Platform adaptations, like Need For Speed or Warcraft or The Super Mario Bros. Movie, often flub the transition by adding in a superfluous story, which just cannot live up to the central appeals of the game – going very very vast, exploring a world/creating your own fun, or the breathless astonishment at having the skill needed to get all the way to that flag at the end of the level. Instead, you get half-cocked lore dumps and fan service. This is where I’d hope Neill Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo would separate itself from the herd, given that it’s got one hell of a logline – and it is, in fact, based on a true story.
Making a Gran Turismo movie is, essentially, an exercise in creating a product placement nesting doll: You have a ferociously accurate racing simulation, with countless man-hours put into nailing the details of the world’s most iconic race tracks and, of course, a whole host of real-world cars, and the film as a whole is produced by the same company that publishes the game (Sony). Blomkamp is admirably forthright about all of that, as the film opens with what amounts to a teaser trailer for the series, with developers and techs laboring over hot monitors and processors, cooking up whatever installment that will inevitably fail to meet each one of its release dates, before it segues into the narrative. It begins with Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), a marketing exec at Nissan, pitching his superiors on a revolutionary concept – taking the most accomplished Gran Turismo players in the world and having them compete for a chance to be signed to Nissan’s motorsports team.
This was a revolutionary concept back in the early ’10s, back when the real events this story was based on occurred, but in order to highlight current tech (you really don’t want people going out and trying to buy PS3s, do you?), and is a little less novel at present, especially after the pandemic popularized e-racing broadcasts before the resumption of actual physical racing. But that brings us to Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a racing fan who sells hosiery to finance his simulator upgrades and is one of the best Gran Turismo drivers in the world. His dad (Djimon Hounsou), a former pro footballer, doesn’t understand and doesn’t want him to pursue a dream without some sort of backup plan, especially since there’s no practical way for him to get into racing – like most drivers, you’ve got to get started in karting pretty early in life, and they didn’t have the money for that shit – so, of course, they’re at odds.
But everything changes when Jann discovers an invite to something called the GT Academy on his account’s homepage one day: win one virtual race and get invited to Nissan’s own training camp to compete for a spot to actually drive a race car professionally. He, of course, wins it and finds himself out on a track in England, toughing it out with nine other sim racers in a bunch of GTs on an actual race track. They’re tutored by Jack Salter (David Harbour), a race tech reluctantly brought back into the game by Moore, who absolutely hates the idea that a bunch of gamers are about to get set out on an unsuspecting racing world and possibly get themselves – or others – killed in the process. Jann surprises Jack with his knowledge and ability, and he eventually comes to respect the kid, as much as he dislikes the fact that someone with virtual experience might be behind the wheel of a car. You’d think the movie would end at what feels like a pretty natural conclusion, with Jann reaching the final race and winning the competition, but Marlborough’s career as a pro racer is just too irresistible for Blomkamp and company to resist.
What follows is the kind of broad-level summary of his early professional career, which is… kind of a nightmare, narratively. One of the reasons I think that Formula 1: Drive to Survive has been so successful on Netflix is because it is a series. Racing seasons are long and punishing – there are dozens of practices, qualifiers, and races, all running toward a grand goal – and the narrative compression here does a massive disservice to the film’s core emotional through-line. As much as one might want to shout from the mountaintops that “A gamer podiumed at Le Mans!” (this is, after all, based on a true story, so spoilers genuinely cannot exist), the weirdness of that competition and the difficulty of that transition, moving from a gaming rig to a supercharged supercar is what’s really notable here, and Blomkamp loses sight of that.
However, all of this ” narrative ” talk would be superfluous if the racing were compelling. And to be fair, some of it is: Blomkamp uses fast-paced drone shots that do a good job of approximating the game’s feel and the racing’s speed. What’s a little less appealing is his reliance on Fast and Furious-style engine cutaways – just imagine the NOS flowing through Vin Diesel’s engine, and you’ll get what I mean – instead of just focusing on the feel of the moment. I kept coming back to Top Gun: Maverick when thinking about Blomkamp’s approach here and how much of an emphasis Koskinski put on the physical strain of flight placed on the pilot (we’re lucky that the dude is going to do a Formula 1 movie for Apple TV+ at some point). Blomkamp never quite manages to distinguish the virtual and physical worlds within the simulated nature of the film itself, and it really doesn’t hold together very well, even if, thanks to the cast, it manages to hold together well enough emotionally. Harbour, Madeweke and Hounsou are all pretty gifted performers who understand the lane that they’re operating in, and they do solid enough work to make us want Mardenborough to win. But the problem remains: There is simply too much going on in this movie for it ever to be able to slow down and focus on one given plotline. Even the reveal that they’re gonna go to Le Mans is dropped at the end, a final checkpoint goal as opposed to an overarching one. Good racing movies tend to center themselves around a single race if they aren’t just about something else, like Fast and Furious being a Point Break riff.
Honestly, I don’t envy Blomkamp’s task here, having to manage the intersection between competing IPs and brands, looking to wrench this story of a dream fulfilled away from those same protectionist instincts. Those same forces stand in the way of this Cinderella story from being good, compelling cinema as much as they stand in the way of on-track success in a pay-to-win video game. What remains perpetually obscured is the thrill of racing – that need for speed, pushing engineering and your body well beyond their limits – and that’s what I hoped that Blomkamp could find in the murky situation that just comes with making a Gran Turismo movie. He has done it before, with his live-action Halo spots being transformative game marketing much like David Fincher’s trailer for Gears of War, using his capabilities as a pseudo-documentarian to bring a tactile realism to grimy science-fiction worlds. In some ways, it’s really good marketing – you’ll spend the entire movie just wishing you were actually playing the damn game instead of watching a poorly-drawn rendition of it – but Gran Turismo ultimately can’t podium, never surpassing its essential origins as a live-action video game trailer, without all of the things that made Blomkamp’s work in the sphere interesting.