<img src="https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/02/0/0/1920/1080/664/0/75/0/81af0d6_1690988737930-df-18893.jpeg" srcset=" https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/02/0/0/1920/1080/556/0/75/0/81af0d6_1690988737930-df-18893.jpeg 556w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/02/0/0/1920/1080/600/0/75/0/81af0d6_1690988737930-df-18893.jpeg 600w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/02/0/0/1920/1080/664/0/75/0/81af0d6_1690988737930-df-18893.jpeg 664w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/02/0/0/1920/1080/700/0/75/0/81af0d6_1690988737930-df-18893.jpeg 700w, https://img.lemde.fr/2023/08/02/0/0/1920/1080/800/0/75/0/81af0d6_1690988737930-df-18893.jpeg 800w" sizes="(min-width: 1024px) 556px, 100vw" alt="Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) in Neill Blomkamp's " gran="" turismo.""="" width="100%" height="auto">
LE MONDE'S RATING – CAN BE AVOIDED
Is the car – in its sporty, testosteroned form – still in style in these times of environmental and masculine decline? It is never a waste of time to look at the great trend-setting machine that is Hollywood to find out. The continued success of the Fast and Furious franchise, for example, might suggest that it is. At the same time, great racing films seem like a thing of the past, with James Mangold's Le Mans 66 (2019) already considered as the nostalgic revival of an extinct genre.
In any event, it was of concern that Gran Turismo – a rather mediocre film produced by Sony studios – had other, less explicitly benign motives than bringing together fans of video games (who today outnumber those who go to the movies), motor racing and cinema behind the same broom wagon, in a show where lucrative opportunism is the first and final word. The clever maneuver was inspired by a very real competition: the GT Academy. Created in 2008 by Nissan and Sony – the developers of the highly successful Gran Turismo driving simulator game – the competition offers champions of the video game the chance to embark on a professional racing career if they win.
More specifically, the film is based on the life of the winner of the 2011 edition, Jann Mardenborough, a young unemployed man from Cardiff (UK) who, at the age of 19, won the competition and joined the Nissan team. Around the revving speedsters, the spectacle of which is not nearly as thrilling as it should be, the screenwriters were paid to develop a novelistic plot of insignificant functional poverty. In a word, it was a script that read like it was written by an artificial intelligence bot, which, given the degree of mental automation that governs Hollywood these days, makes us wonder why we are so alarmed that they are destined to be replaced at a fraction of the cost.
Here are just a few examples of the elements that are supposed to create the narrative: there is the son, a champion of the Gran Turismo video game, who is disowned by his father, always looking in the rear-view mirror, but who ultimately makes amends; the trainer, Jack Salter, a traumatized former racing driver whose career was interrupted by a fatal road accident, who sees himself in the disapproval that the young PlayStation prodigy is suffering in the industry; the apprentice driver's No. 1 adversary, an arrogant psychopathic track star rolling in money; and the girlfriend, placed at the beginning and end of the film, who fits the bill of the perfect trophy wife.
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