GRAN TURISMO

Gran Turismo tells the story of real life sim racer turned professional racing driver Jann Mardenborough.

Now, as is often the case with modern day biopics, the events portrayed in this film are based in truth, rather than being the truth.

The majority of things in the film did actually happen to the real Jann Mardenborough - who interestingly serves has his own stunt double in the film - but they have been moved around, pulled apart, and put back together in a slightly different order before being presented to the audience.

But the bare bones remain the same. Jann Mardenborough was a sim racer, who trained almost exclusively on his playstation, before winning the GT Academy and becoming a professional racing driver, who a few years later would achieve a podium finish in a 24-hour race at Le Mans.

If this wasn’t fact it would sound unbelievable.

I had, you will not be surprised to learn, not heard of Jann Mardenborough before watching Gran Turismo. My knowledge of racing is minimal. Less than minimal. In fact I think every bit of racing knowledge I have - and I cannot overstate how low this bar is - has come from watching 2019’s brilliant Le Mans’ 66.

But this doesn’t matter, as Gran Turismo doesn’t try to beat its audience over the head with the technical side of things.

Instead it has a deep understand of why people follow sports. The highs and lows, the drama, the victory and the defeat. And Gran Turismo has all of that. It leans far further into the emotional side of sport than the technical and this is easily its greatest strength.

I found myself watching this not as someone who knew or cared about racing, but as someone he knows and cares about a sport. I wanted Jann (Archie Madekwe) to win, and so did the rest of the audience judging by the genuine - seemingly - involuntary cheers for his early successes in my screening.

And watching Gran Turismo was the closest I have ever come to understanding how people can get from racing what I get from football. Nothing else has ever come close to doing this and I say it as a huge compliment to the creative team behind it.

The driving is fast and tense, and it is immediately clear that we are not dealing in CGI. These are real cars on a real track - there is an interesting video here which touches on how they achieved this - and this is a choice that allows you to feel the speed they are travelling. Feel every bump and gear change and crash.

But most importantly it manages to convey the danger that these athletes put themselves in every time they go out onto the tarmac. You feel here, which I often find you don’t in films like this, that even the slightest mistake, the slightest miscalculation, could be lethal, and this really helps to raise the stakes.

Gran Turismo is also a film that understands the game it is based on, and manages to incorporate features from it is a way that feels natural.

The GT-esque place markers that are shown throughout the race could have, in other hands, felt tacky or distracting, but here they work; serving as a reminder of how Jann sees racing, and how his experiences on his playstation have helped him become the driver that he is.

I mentioned Le Mans’ 66 earlier, and this will be an obvious point of comparison. Not only because they are both recent racing films, but because the track of Le Mans, and the weight that it holds in the racing community, plays so heavily in Gran Turismo.

Both films put you inside the car to create extremely entertaining driving sequences without the use of CGI, but where Gran Turismo stumbled slightly in comparison was in what was happening outside the car.

I found that I just could not bring myself to care about the familial relations and drama that surrounded Jann and in these moments I found myself wishing that we were back behind the wheel.

Luckily though Gran Turismo, or at least director Neill Blomkamp, seems to realise this, and for the majority of its runtime the action does take centre stage.

I felt that the most recent Gran Turismo game (Gran Turismo 7) came across as somewhat cold an clinical, and there are conversations in the film about whether it is a game at all or a straight up simulator. Regardless of how you class it, I never felt that GT7 was fun.

Thankfully any fun that I missed in the game, is absolutely present here. Gran Turismo is an electrifying, pacy and hugely entertaining film, which should tick all the boxes for audiences whether they have an interest in motorsport or not; whether are familiar with the sport, or the game that the movie is based on, or if they are coming in completely cold.

It may not be your typical shooty, punchy action blockbuster of the summer, however it delivers more high octane thrills than anything else that has been released this year so far.