Some movies about motorsports are fantastic – others, not so much. But what makes the good ones grand and the bad ones horrific? The answer to that isn’t so easy, as one viewer might see entertainment gold while the other walks out of the theater. Sure, there are movies racing enthusiasts generally agree upon as solid (Ford v Ferrari and Rush come to mind), but for every critically-acclaimed flick, there are countless poor attempts to capture the passion of the motoring world – a topic author Jack Swansey recently tackled on Hagerty.com/media.
To understand the subject at hand, Swansey walks readers through the basic structure of most films. “There is a series of story beats that tend to occur in good movies – I often see screenwriter Christopher Vogler’s 12-step ‘Hero’s Journey’ – but the most basic version is the famous ‘three-act structure,’” Swansey explains.
The author walks readers through multiple acts in the recent film Gran Turismo, and later points out the key reason why some people may enjoy a particular motorsports movie while others despise it.
“Racing’s narrative structure, so familiar to fans of the sport, is near-impossible to drop directly to the silver screen,” he writes. “Just like a novel or a TV show, it has to be adapted. And adaptations always make changes to the source material. They have to, in order to make it work in a new medium, but those changes can be frustrating to those in the know. Anyone expecting the film adaptation to be just like the book is almost inevitably disappointed. It can’t be exactly like the book because it’s a movie, which means a movie about racing will never be just like watching a race.”
As Swansey notes, there are more motorsports movies on the horizon, the most notable being Ferrari, a movie due out on Christmas Day of this year starring Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz.
Regardless of whether or not you enjoy Hollywood’s interpretation of the sport we love, this Hagerty.com/media article is worth a read…
Photo courtesy 20th Century Studios / Hagerty
