One Of The Great American Masterpieces Of Film Is Coming To El Paso

I bought a ticket to Speed Racer in 2008 as a joke.

I want to be completely transparent with you about that. I was a film snob. I was the kind of person who used the word "cinema" with a completely straight face and thought the highest form of art was anything brooding, ambiguous, and filmed on 16mm. So when I heard that the Wachowskis, the directors who had literally changed the course of Hollywood with The Matrix, had decided their big follow-up would be a live action adaptation of a 1960s anime about a guy named Speed Racer...I laughed. I bought the ticket the same way someone buys a novelty hat. Ironically. For the bit.

I cried three times during that movie.

Not once. Three times. And I would do it again, and I will do it again, because Premiere Cinemas here in El Paso is one of the 225 locations across the country selected to screen the newly remastered Speed Racer during the weekend of April 25th. Our showtimes are April 25th, April 26th, and April 29th. And if you have any love for great filmmaking, for family, for the kind of movie that sneaks up behind you and absolutely destroys you emotionally while simultaneously assaulting your eyeballs with the most beautiful neon chaos you have ever witnessed, you need to be in that theater.

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Why Should El Pasoans Go See This Box Office Disaster?

When Speed Racer hit theaters on May 9th, 2008, it made $93.9 million against a $120 million budget. Critics were not kind. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus at the time called it overloaded with headache-inducing effects. Audiences largely stayed home. By every conventional Hollywood metric, Speed Racer was a failure.

Here is the part nobody ever wants to talk about: Speed Racer opened one week after Iron Man, the film that launched the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe and changed superhero movies forever. Then, ten weeks later, The Dark Knight arrived and became the highest-grossing film of 2008, earning over a billion dollars worldwide and turning Heath Ledger's Joker into a cultural monument. Speed Racer did not just get a bad reception. It got sandwiched between two of the most dominant blockbusters of the entire decade, in a summer when audiences had already decided what kind of movies they wanted, and a neon animated kids film about a racing family was not it. The deck was not stacked against Speed Racer. The deck was on fire.

Seventeen years later, it is being rereleased.

Let that sit for a second. Movies that fail do not get rereleases. Movies that fail do not get remastered in 4K. Movies that fail do not generate the kind of retrospective passion that has slowly, quietly built around this film over nearly two decades until it became undeniable enough that Warner Bros. and Flashback Cinema decided the world needed to see it on the biggest screen possible. Speed Racer did not fail. Speed Racer arrived before the world was ready for it. There is a difference, and that difference is currently being projected in IMAX in 225 cities across the United States, including ours.

Even the Critics Who Hated It Eventually Came Around

The story of Speed Racer's critical reception is not just that it got bad reviews. It is that some of the people who gave it those bad reviews eventually had to come back and publicly admit they were wrong, which is one of the rarest things a professional critic will ever do.

Scott Tobias, a film critic with a long and respected career, gave Speed Racer a C when it first came out and described it in his original review as a "big, indigestible lump." Years later, he went back. He rewatched it. And then he wrote a full reversal, publishing it under the headline "The New Cult Canon," in which he acknowledged that his earlier reaction said more about where his head was in 2008 than it did about the quality of the film. He wrote that the Wachowskis may have been "too far ahead of the curve," and that over time Speed Racer no longer seemed indigestible because his own capacity for processing images had changed, and the film's visual language had become more legible. He described the Grand Prix finale as achieving a kind of transcendence, comparing it to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tobias said "But that’s the thing about cutting-edge work: Not everyone is ready for the future, even if they suspect they’re seeing it. Over time, Speed Racer has no longer seemed like a 'big, indigestible lump' because my metabolism for processing images has changed, and its hummingbird flutter of montages, superimpositions, and visual effects is more legible."

That is a remarkable thing to say about a movie you once gave a C. And Scott Tobias is not alone. The Gate, a Canadian film publication, published a piece simply titled "I Was Wrong About Speed Racer," in which the writer described how a programmer had spent years hosting screenings and converting skeptics one by one. The writer had been one of those skeptics, convinced the film was irredeemable candy-coated nonsense, until he saw it properly and walked out a convert, concluding that critics were "horribly off base" when they refused to engage with the material beyond a surface level.

When professional critics are publishing full reversals with their names attached, that is not a cult fandom being delusional. That is a film that was ahead of its time, and a critical establishment that eventually had the humility to say so.

El Paso Needs To See It To Truly Believe It

Here is the honest pitch for Speed Racer, and I mean the honest one, not the trailer version: it is a kids movie. It is bright. It is loud. It has a chimpanzee doing physical comedy. There are moments so aggressively silly that you will wonder if you accidentally walked into a Saturday morning cartoon. The Wachowskis themselves declared during production that they were going to "assault every single modern aesthetic with this film," and they did not miss.

But underneath all of that, underneath every candy-colored frame and every goofy Spritle moment, is a film about a family trying to hold itself together after loss. Speed Racer is grieving his brother Rex, and so is everyone in the Racer household, and the film never lets you forget that. John Goodman as Pops and Susan Sarandon as Mom are not background characters there to deliver exposition. They are two of the most grounded, fully human performances in any blockbuster from that era, anchoring a kaleidoscopic fever dream to something that feels achingly real. Emile Hirsch carries the film on his back and makes you believe every single second of it, which is genuinely difficult when the world around you looks like what would happen if someone put Tokyo Disneyland inside a lava lamp.

The story itself, beneath the spectacle, is about a small family business refusing to be swallowed by a corrupt corporation. It is about integrity. It is about what you owe to the people who came before you and the name they left behind. It is a film about love, wrapped inside the most aggressively unhinged visual experience mainstream American cinema has ever produced.

The Wachowskis Changed Hollywood Forever

There was a genuine conversation in Hollywood for years about what filmmaking looked like before The Matrix and what it looked like after. That first film did not just redefine action movies. It rewired what audiences thought was possible on screen. Bullet time. Wire work presented as choreography. The specific grammar of that film worked its way into everything that came after it.

Speed Racer pushed that same boundary in a completely different direction. The cinematography alone, shot on the then-prototype Sony CineAlta F23 camera, was engineered to create what director of photography David Tattersall described as a "hyper-real look," a hybrid of film, digital, and animation that had never been attempted before. The Wachowskis used a technique that achieved what animators call infinite depth of field, where objects at every distance are equally sharp and in focus simultaneously, giving the film the visual logic of a comic panel rather than a photograph. This was not an accident or a stylistic shortcut. It was a deliberate, technically demanding choice to make the world of the film feel like it existed in its own dimension.

The racing sequences do not look like any other racing sequences in the history of cinema. They look like Hot Wheels brought to life by someone who had consumed every great anime ever made and decided to translate that energy into something that could only exist as a live action film. And those sequences, at their best, produce a feeling in your chest that is difficult to describe except to say that you will understand it the moment you experience it on the big screen.

El Paso Gets to Be Part of This

Out of every city in the country, we are one of 225 that gets to see this film the way it deserves to be seen. Not on a laptop. Not on a streaming service where you might pause it to check your phone. In theaters. With the volume up and nowhere to look but straight ahead at the most visually ambitious film a major studio released in the first decade of this century.

I know what you are thinking because I thought the same thing in 2008. You are thinking it sounds ridiculous. A movie called Speed Racer based on an anime you maybe only know from a parody episode of something else, directed by the people who made The Matrix, filled with neon colors and a monkey. That's a hard sell. I understand.

But here is what I need you to understand: I have been saying for years that Speed Racer is one of the great American cinematic masterpieces, and I have said it knowing how crazy that sounds, and I have never once taken it back, because I have seen what happens when someone gives this movie an honest chance. I have watched people cross that finish line skeptical and come out the other side completely undone.

April 25. April 26. April 29. Premiere Cinemas.

Come watch me be right.