Sony’s Gran Turismo movie is based on the true story of driver Jann Mardenborough, but the film makes a major change to an incident that happened in his career. Early reviews for the movie have started to make their way online, and multiple reviewers have taken issue with the movie’s handling of the death of a spectator during a race. The death is based on a true incident that happened in 2015, years after Mardenborough began racing. However, the movie inserts that death earlier in his career, using it as a form of dramatic motivation. In his review, Polygon‘s Oli Welsh called the change “tasteless.”
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“There is one particularly troubling aspect to the way American Sniper co-writer Jason Hall and Creed IIIco-writer Zach Baylin frame the accident, a freak occurrence at theNürburgring circuit that killed a spectator. While the crash did happenpretty much as depicted, Hall and Baylin’s screenplay time-shifts it inorder to stage it as a defining, motivating setback on Mardenborough’shero’s journey to his Le Mans podium. The actual accident happened yearslater — arguably a tasteless reframing of a fatal event,” writes Welsh.
Welsh is not the only person that has taken issue with the change. Charlotte O’Sullivan of the Evening Standard stated that “suggesting the incident helped propel Jann to greatness is not only false, it’s reprehensible.” Empire‘s John Nugent was less critical of the event’s reframing (or may have been unaware of the change). Nugent notes that the death’s inclusion “emphasises the real danger of the real-life sport.”
It’s possible the spectator’s death in Gran Turismo was included for that very reason, as a way of showcasing the difference between PlayStation and real-life. Whatever the case might be, it’s easy to understand why its inclusion might not sit well with viewers. Adaptations have always taken liberties with the true events that inspired them, but an incident that resulted in the death of an innocent bystander could reopen the wounds of that person’s friends and family, if not handled with care.
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[H/T: Video Games Chronicle]
