The fakeness of Gran Turismo, a car racing movie that promised reality
Jack Baruth
Sony’s Gran Turismo series of games, which debuted in 1997 and continues to the present day, has long set the standard for accuracy in the field. The efforts to which its creator, Kazunori Yamauchi, and his team have gone to support that accuracy are justifiably legendary. The games have spawned a massive global community of “sim racers” who spend astounding amounts of time mastering the intricacies of the simulation. Gran Turismo has made a form of motorsports possible for millions of people who don’t have the time, money, or resources to compete “IRL” while raising the question: Could a successful simulation racer make the transition to real asphalt, rubber, and metal?
From 2008 to 2016, Sony and Nissan attempted to answer that question and promote their products via “GT Academy,” which offered sim racers a chance to earn a real-life competitive opportunity in Nissan’s race programs. The program never produced a genuine champion or superstar, but the third season’s winner, Jann Mardenborough, captured some global attention and has managed a journeyman’s career in racing across the past decade. His story, remixed and fictionalized, provides the basis for District 9 and Elysium director Neill Blomkamp’s new film, Gran Turismo.
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Obviously, this film has been eagerly awaited by sim racers, but those of us who compete in the real world have also been looking forward to it for a simple but sad reason: With the possible exception of interstellar travel, no human activity has been so consistently misrepresented in film as motor racing. In real life, it’s a game of precision, thoughtfulness, and consistency in which the admittedly genuine risks are either minimized by the participants or dismissed entirely. On the silver screen, it is a constant dance with death in which nobody is willing to depress the accelerator pedal completely until the last minute and the cars respond to their drivers’ emotions in the way horses are said to do.
The film generally accepted as the most realistic portrayal of racing up to this point, Steve McQueen’s Le Mans of 1971, strikes most everyday moviegoers as an aimless incoherence almost entirely bereft of both dialogue and plot. Nothing against McQueen, mind you. Given the conditions under which Le Mans was made, which included everything from horrifying injuries to a storyline that was mostly assembled after the fact from the available footage, it’s a wonder it got made at all. This time around, however, we had hoped for more. The all-star lineup behind Gran Turismo seemed to promise a reasonably accurate portrayal of both sim racing and the real thing. In the same way that John Milton wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to Man,” it seemed possible that Sony and Blomkamp could capture and communicate our passions to our friends and neighbors.
Unfortunately, those hopes are entirely dashed well before Gran Turismo finishes plodding through the first hour of its dreary 2-hour, 15-minute run time, and the reason is simple: There’s little to no realism in this movie about what Sony calls “the real driving simulator.” In some cases, this is to be expected. The actual GT Academy was a reality TV show with a side helping of race instruction that benefited from massive funding, PR, and goodwill throughout its existence. In the film, it’s a scrappy against-the-odds project in which the participants are warned how much they will be “hated” by everyone else in the sport. There’s a ridiculous and entirely fabricated subplot about a lack of support from Mardenborough’s parents, portrayed by the otherwise charming Djimon Hounsou and Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell Horner in performances so wooden I stayed for the credits to make sure neither of them had been animated via CGI after the fact. Every race in the movie is critical. The program is always on the verge of being canceled. You get the idea.
Annoyingly, the small details in Gran Turismo are incompetently done, particularly the automotive ones. Cars sprout clutch pedals and shift levers halfway through races, only to lose them and revert to paddle-shifted automatics when that is more convenient for the cinematographer. The climactic race at Le Mans features Nissan’s first-division “LMP1” race car competing directly against gentleman-driver “LMP3” cars, which is roughly equivalent to a boxing film in which Mike Tyson is expected to lose against a teenaged Floyd Mayweather, or perhaps Ronda Rousey. When our protagonists make a move from racing in GT-class sports cars to prototypes, which is a change similar to quitting slow-pitch softball in favor of the major leagues, not only are they given no time to try out the new car before the race, all of their existing competitors also switch to prototypes, including the (predictably white and wealthy) villain. Cars from different decades, classes, and race series are all jumbled together. Part of the plot is that Mardenborough must finish fourth or better in a televised race to earn an FIA international pro competition license. Your author has that same license, obtained through the considerably less dramatic avenue of submitting a racing resume, a letter of recommendation, and a modest check.
Yet all of that is simply par for the course in Hollywood, a place where revolvers never run out of ammunition in a gunfight and bartenders live in two-bedroom New York co-ops. Suspension of disbelief is part of the game. Don’t like it? Read a book or something.
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The truly disappointing part of Gran Turismo is all the ways in which it fundamentally misrepresents motor racing. Mardenborough succeeds in the film’s climax because he imagines a new way to drive a racing line through corners, something that probably hasn’t been done since before the arrival of color television. Multinational corporations are portrayed as underdogs, bullied incessantly by all-powerful thugs who race with family or self-made money. (In real life, those of us who race on a checkbook or credit card are the continual and often capricious victims of automakers and their “pull” with the race organizers.) The rusty old cliché of shifting gears and flooring the gas to get ahead happens again and again. As in Days of Thunder and Driven and every other reality-averse racing film, there is a scene in which a driver is overcome by flashbacks in the middle of the race, takes his foot off the gas, and has to be talked into continuing by his crew chief, at which point he magically makes up all the ground he has lost during his reverie.
For all the beauty of its visual composition and special effects, Gran Turismo comes off in the end as little more than a Sony commercial, an extended remix of the original GT Academy reality TV show saturated beyond reason with lazy storytelling devices and near-pornographic attention to corporate logos. No doubt it was intended to make the video game seem more exciting, and perhaps it does, but it is more notable for the way in which it slow-roasts the excitement and interest out of actual motor racing. Those of us who have defined our lives, and occasionally seen others lose theirs, pursuing the thrill of victory around a racetrack will have to hope someone does it better. Because when it comes to reality, this Gran Turismo film is to racing what Super Mario Bros. is to plumbing.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.