Our first glimpse at the Gran Turismo movie has arrived, and it looks fine. The trailer seems like it gives away the first two acts, and it's a little on the nose with David Harbour playing a guy who hates gamers, but then he needs a gamer, but it's fine. The part where the gamer rig transforms into a real car is some cool VFX work, the racing looks realistic yet exciting, and the strong cast are going to be able to carry it. But one of the things that the marketing keeps pushing is that it's based on a true story - and I'm struggling to understand why I should care.
Maybe that's because even without knowing the true story before seeing the trailer, it told me everything that was going to happen. It's weird that I know just from the 90 second trailer that there's a guy who's great at Gran Turismo, his dad doesn't believe in him, he's in an October Sky-style village where everyone is stuck in dead end jobs, he wins a contest for racing in GT that lets him race real cars, the coach doesn't like it and he sucks at first but he's the best, he's on team Nissan and the racers hate him, then a crash involving some real racers means he has to go from gamer to racer. He also probably wins. Scratch the first two acts, that's the movie, right there. I mean, that's the whole story.
One of Stephen King's major rules for writing is that readers will make one leap with you. Just one thing in the story is extraordinary, and people will go with it if the rest is ordinary. It is a story of normal kids in a normal town doing normal things - your one leap is there's a killer clown. In Carrie, it's a regular school with regular bullies - your one leap is that the victim has telekinetic powers. In Gran Turismo, it's that there was a contest for gamers to become racers. Everything else in the movie makes sense. I'm making the one leap with you. The fact it's a leap that happened in real life means nothing to me.
It has the makings of a fairly generic sports movie. Underdog is dumped on a coach who hates him, he wins his respect, then the competition hates him, he wins their respect, then he either wins or loses valiantly, gaining respect from the one guy who still wasn't convinced in the meantime. Even the leap is not that large. It happened, for one thing, but in F1 many racers like Alonso and Vettel have reported playing video games to familiarise themselves with the turns and pathways of new tracks that are recreated in games like EA’s F1 series before the racers get to burn rubber in real life.
I've since looked up this true story and it makes me even more surprised that the angle is being pushed so hard. I mentioned October Sky earlier, another fairly average story inflated in importance due to its basis in fact, but at least Homer Hickam's tale was based on his bestselling book. Jann Mardenborough, whose true story the film is based on, does not seem to be all that connected to this movie. His name is used, but he was not the first person to win this contest (he was third) and 19 people have won since. His racing career is respectable but unremarkable - he has ten individual wins across his career, and his highest finish in any contest is second, which he achieved twice out of 29 contests, neither of which were with Nissan, whose brand is heavily featured in the trailer.
Mardenborough was also born in Darlington, in the North East of England, as the son of a former professional footballer (which does not seem to be the case in the movie), and grew up in Cardiff. Watching interviews with him, he sounds very different to the Mardenborough of the film. I don't list Mardenborough's decent enough career stats to belittle him. What he achieved is extraordinary, to have a competent career in racing after learning it on the PlayStation. It would make for a great, small stakes movie about determination, invention, and the ability we all have to lift ourselves to wherever we want to go - you know, like October Sky.
Instead, this glitzy trailer seems to begrudge that Mardenborough did not become the youngest ever world champion with PS4 stickers all over his car. It is pushing the true story angle fiercely but little of what we've seen in the trailer suggests it is concerned with mythos over truth, and brand recognition above all. The clue is in the title - this is a movie about the video game (Hey, go buy it! Buy it now!) rather than about the man.
It feels a little dishonest to use Mardenborough's story this way to make a movie about a racing sim with no real narrative to speak of. It's a story worthy of celebrations, but for all the helicopter chases and music riffs and inspirational slogans, it doesn't feel like a celebration. At least, not one of Mardenborough. Instead, it’s for the logos splattered everywhere. It's based on a true story the movie doesn't really want us to know. It just wants us to play Gran Turismo.