Gran Turismo's Sponsored Race 

GRAN TURISMO. How does one approach a project such as this one, for all intents and purposes a feature length advertisement for the Gran Turismo game (sorry, simulator) franchise, Playstation/Sony and Nissan, without the cynicism immediately engendered by such shilling? With great difficulty and trepidation, would be my answer.

On the other side of the ledger, I have been a casual appreciator of professional motorsport most of my life and, in adulthood, a participant in some decidedly amateur racing. More salient to this conversation, I've always enjoyed watching cars go fast on screen. I find the technical and artistic challenges of rendering that speed among the most fascinating in the world of cinema, at least in part because they are so rarely met with new, successful ways of thinking. Further, only a handful of movies have set out to honestly examine the inner lives of racing drivers, the focus and resiliency required to forsake so much else in service of repeatedly climbing into a machine and making it go fast enough to kill yourself and others.

And so, despite my reservations about the above-the-line corporatization of an undertaking like Gran Turismo, I was still excited to see it. This in no small part because it represents a return to features for director Neill Blomkamp who, after his splashy debut with District 9 in 2009, went on to make a pair of unfairly maligned, beautifully crafted, deceptively insightful science-action thrillers about artificial intelligence, eugenics and economic disparity (Elysium, 2013; Chappie, 2015). Since then, Blomkamp seems to have gone into some sort of director's jail, whether of his own making or the industry's. The commercial and critical success of District 9 may have been as much curse as blessing for the young director, allowing him access to the resources to produce even more thoughtful work when audiences and financiers likely wanted more of the same. Regardless, Blomkamp's CV for the intervening decade or so consists mostly of video game and short subject work. I was excited to see his name attached to a large-scale production that might provide opportunities for him to stretch out visually, maybe even explore some ideas.

It did not occur to me until midway through Gran Turismo how appropriate, if unlikely, a director he is for a project like this: a defense of simulation technology as proving ground for top-tier racing drivers.

Some background is probably in order. As title cards repeatedly inform us, the movie is based on a true story which, actually, is set within another true story. The initial impetus comes from Kazunori Yamauchi, a game developer who, under the aegis of Polyphony Digital, set out to create the world's foremost (and most accessible) auto racing simulator. This was some 30 years ago now, and the process took half a decade, yielding the first in a genre-defining series of games for the Playstation console.

Gran Turismo, the game, was and is vaunted for its absolute adherence to real-world physics, loving re-creation of race cars (including their sounds) and meticulous mapping of the world's most renowned racetracks. Because I am not and have never been a true gamer, my beef with it has always lain in the fact that a game controller cannot replicate the inputs and feedback of a car's actual controls. I long balked at the notion of Gran Turismo, in spite of its sterling technical accuracy, serving as a real racing simulator.

As in all things, the technology of gaming long since passed me by: In the 21st century, real sim-racers (I don't like the phrase but it has become canonical) have seats and pedal assemblies and steering wheels eerily similar to those found in (sotto voce) real race cars. And just as the player interface has evolved, so have the game's engines and the developers' access; the simulation approaches reality.

At some point, a Nissan marketing wonk named Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) got hip to the motorsport singularity and pitched the bosses on a real-life racing academy to be attended by the most elite sim-racers in the world. Perhaps because Nissan, especially in their motorsport division, is as technology-obsessed a manufacturer as any, the project got a green light. Moore would go on to conscript a one-time top-level driver named Jack Salter (David Harbour) as chief engineer, set up a GT competition and fill the freshman class of GT academy with a bunch of kids who, by and large, had never driven on a racetrack (IRL).

Foremost among those kids, our protagonist Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), an earnest would-be champion from a working-class family in Cardiff. Not to give anything away, Jann makes believers of the skeptics, Salter perhaps foremost among them, but not without facing a few dark nights of the racing driver's soul.

Blomkamp brings his fascination with technology very much into focus here and, as much as I may have preferred a different approach, I think it suits the subject matter almost perfectly. The end result might be a little too refined, too bloodless, lacking some of the sweat and desperation of racing as I have known it, but it is a competent and effective piece of advertising — sorry, entertainment — nonetheless. PG13. 135M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.

NOW PLAYING

BARBIE. Barbie and Ken live in a colorful, seemingly idyllic world but want to leave it behind for the real one. Where can I sign up for this version of Freaky Friday? With Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and Will Ferrell. PG13. 114M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.

BLUE BEETLE. Xolo Maridueña plays a teen granted alien superpowers in this DC Comics adventure. PG13. 127M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.

THE EQUALIZER 3. Denzel Washington reprises his role as an erstwhile assassin aiding underdogs, this time in Italy. R. 109M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

ELEMENTAL. Animated adventure about a city of fire, water, earth and air elements. Voiced by Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie and Catherine O'Hara. PG. 93M. BROADWAY.

THE HILL. Baseball biopic starring Dennis Quaid and Colin Ford. PG. 126M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

JURASSIC PARK 3D (1993). Spoiler: Life finds a way. PG13. 127M. BROADWAY.

THE MEG 2: THE TRENCH. Jason Statham and Jing Wu fight another prehistorically ridiculous shark. PG13. 116M. BROADWAY.

OPPENHEIMER. Christopher Nolan's biopic about theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb." Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. R. 180M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.

RETRIBUTION. Liam Neeson stars a bank executive trying not to get blown up with his kids by a criminal mastermind. R. 90M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

STRAYS. An abandoned dog falls in with a gang of tough pooches in this talking-pet comedy voiced by Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx and Isla Fisher. R. 93M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

TALK TO ME. Aussie teens commune with spirits via an embalmed forearm handshake and things get ... out of hand. R. 95M. BROADWAY.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM. The crime-fighting brothers emerge from New York City's sewers for an animated adventure. PG. 99M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

Fortuna Theatre is temporarily closed due to earthquake damage. For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.