Death Race

If you browsed print criticism of Paul W S Anderson's Death Race, you'll have noted repeated assurances from critics that the film's aesthetic resembled that of a video game. Does it though? In some corners, likening a motion picture to a video game has become lazy shorthand for stressing that a shallow artificiality has been detected in the piece. Death Race fits that bill: it's a film thrash-cut to a point were geography and the spatial relationships of characters are unintelligible. Anderson's remake is superficial, mindless and designed to elicit maximum gratification from a pubescent, predominantly male audience, hence it resembles a 'lower' art. Comparing a film to a video game is seen as the absolute lowest kind of slight. The filmmakers are so inept that they've accidentally made something subterranean. There's an arts class system in place, with video games right at the absolute bottom of the heap.

Perhaps you wonder why this is the case? Is it the medium's (relative) newness that offends? Or is it that games are exclusively written on computers in an office setting? This carpeted crucible apparently antithetical to many people's idea of what art is. These sort of people, it must be said, are those who seem to believe that films and music are simply wished into being by magical 'creatives' rather than toiled over in locked, industrialised settings. Video games are then a horrifying example of incomprehensible modernity: they're mass-produced, and largely premised on the ability to express the violent urges that most responsible adults would deem embarrassing. They're artless simulation, basically. Even with all of this in mind, Death Race does not resemble any kind of video game I've ever played. More specifically, Death Race does not resemble a racing game. 

Video games are about play. They're about feedback led choices in scenarios with hardwired rules. The accurate feedback required to make second-by-second decisions means the player requires a static viewpoint. Death Race is nothing like this. The film's action viewed from hundreds of brief, contrary vantages. In video games based around racing vehicles there is a choice - you are usually either explicitly the driver (inhabiting an increasingly realistic cockpit), a third-person perspective that resembles that of a child playing with their toy or, literally, the vehicle itself. You are never anything as passive as an audience. Anderson's Death Race is constructed out of tiny disconnected impressions, but, in the main, it represents the crowd's impression of events. There is no overall sequence. This is the problem, if you can't understand what is going on, you can't play. 

Interactive viewpoints for racing games have long been patterned after Claude Lelouch's 1976 short film C'etait un rendez-vous. This exhilarating piece is one unbroken eight-minute take, shot through the eyes of a speeding car. This sustained perspective paying dividends in immersion. You're there for the duration of the hair-raising drive, rather than just a jumble of carefully selected highlights. Comparatively, Death Race is about a simulated kind of excitement, and perhaps this is were these critics falter. Presumably, nothing genuinely spectacular was captured on film during the making of Death Race or, perhaps, nothing spectacular enough. Anderson's rolling cameras captured no sequences so arresting that whoever directed the film's moment-to-moment assembly then felt emboldened enough to hold on a particular shot, and allow the audience to really take in an overall sense of space. Instead the film is viewed in fragments, the perspective repeatedly juggled in the hopes of suggesting chaos. There is no sense of speed in Anderson's Death Race. Rapidly cutting on fast moving cars kills any sensation of speed. There is no propulsion. Cars move by the same barely dressed warehouse set again and again. They may as well be trapped in amber. Death Race resembles nothing at all.