So when this movie came out, it was received as the Wachowskis’ version of Peter Jackson’s King Kong — a remake of an original most people didn’t care about at all. In both cases, the assumption was that the director was just cashing the blank check their absurdly successful trilogy had gotten them to fund a personal passion project; and the reviews of both movies indicated that most people could continue not caring about these franchises, because the movies weren’t very good.

But over time, reactions to the two movies have diverged. Nobody still cares about Jackson’s monkey movie, but this one’s gotten a critical reappraisal. This article from former AV Club reviewer Scott Tobias goes so far as to say that his original negative review was just wrong. This video essay argues for the movie’s greatness (and mentions Tobias’s reappraisal in the course of that argument).

And so of course, this made me curious to see it, even though a) as aforementioned, I did not care even slightly about the original Speed Racer, and b) when the movie came out, I definitely remember thinking that it looked terrible.

So the good news is that the critical reappraisal is right: It is in fact good. And what’s interesting about it is that I can so easily see why it didn’t hit with critics (or audiences) back then.

Because what it’s doing is working in this hyper-stylized, hyper-saturated, hyper-kinetic, over-the-top gonzo mode that you simply didn’t see back then. As the video essay notes, this was released the same year as Iron Man and The Dark Knight. After two decades of superhero movies, it’s hard to remember how those hit at the time, but the big thing about both of them is that they were realistic. The MCU was born in a movie that seemed to be set in the real world, only with some tech that’s cooler-than-real; and Nolan pushed Batman back from Burton’s gothic styling or Schumacher’s camp into a similarly realistic mode.

One of the wonderful things about having a long history of write-ups behind me is that I can illustrate this in the first person — if you go read my contemporary write-up of Thor you’ll see that in 2011, I referred to “the relentless mundanity of Hollywood superhero movies,” and contrasted that to Branagh’s “over-the-top” “ultra-cosmic insanity.” By the standards of modernity, that first Thor movie is sedate, conventional, maybe even a little stiff. But by the standards of 2011… well, I wasn’t using those descriptors in some kind of contrarian sense.

And if you’re in a world where Kenneth fucking Branagh might seem like a paragon of over-the-top insanity, a movie like Speed Racer is difficult to even parse. It’s just too new, too different, too shocking — especially when it’s in the guise of a safe family movie rather than an arthouse experiment. These days, we’ve had the MCU build us up to things like Thor: Ragnarok that are a lot closer to Speed Racer’s aesthetics; we’ve got Everything Everywhere All at Once, with its varied styles; we’ve got Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things; and maybe most directly, we have the neon pink hyper-saturated world of Barbie.

I remarked, when talking about The Color of Pomegranates, that sometimes a movie can be so foreign you can’t even understand it. In 2008, I think the visual language of Speed Racer genuinely crossed that threshold for a lot of viewers, in a way that it doesn’t today.

It’s easy for a modern to look at this movie and understand it — but also, critically, even from a perspective of 2026, to see what it’s doing that no other movie has done: Combining grounded human acting with anime stylings and a visual language that’s not like anything else out there. The opening race sequence alone is this structurally intense series of flashbacks where, mid-race, we’re cutting back and forth to the past in this almost seamless way, somehow without ever slowing the momentum of the race down, ultimately blending past and present together in a way that borders on magical realism as filtered through a videogame. Obviously Speed Racer can see his brother’s ghost car on the course!

Also, though: I don’t think technological advances are the primary reason for this movie’s reconsideration, but they sure don’t hurt. I watched this on a 4K disc, and it might be the single movie I’ve seen that most benefits from HDR and a wide color gamut — its aesthetic practically begs for that level of saturation and contrast, given how thoroughly it rejects realism. In SDR it would honestly look a little flat.

I’m talking about the visual styling here, because that’s the biggest strength of the movie. This looks like nothing else out there even today, and obviously it was too original back in 2008. But it’s worth saying that the movie is also weird at a story level. Like, its protagonist is named Speed Racer, and that’s his government name — his dad is Pops Racer, his brother is Rex Racer, and his parents just named him “Speed.” Oh, and his little brother has a pet chimp, because of course he does.

But for all this weirdness, it’s dripping with sincerity in a way that was also unusual in the age of a wisecracking Tony Stark and a stoic Bruce Wayne. It’s a movie about family and love and pursuing your art — multiple people refer to racing as Speed’s art in the film — in a way that can get past the corruption inherent in the system. It doesn’t take too much extrapolation to see this as a movie about movies. This all presumably helps its critical reclamation in two ways: The first is that sincerity and emotional vulnerability are a register that audiences are a lot more comfortable with now than they were in the attitude-era aughts; the second is simply that critics love movies about movies.

If you’ve appreciated what the Wachowskis did with The Matrix, you owe it to yourself to see what they did here. It wasn’t as obviously influential on day one, but in a very real way, it pointed toward the future of movies just as strongly.