Tony Scott Retrospective: “Days of Thunder” (1990)

There are very few things I care less about than NASCAR racing. That's not to say I hate it or I think it's stupid, it's just something that doesn't matter to me at all. If all traces of NASCAR were obliterated instantaneously, I doubt it would have any affect on my life one way or the other (unless its absence somehow effected the economy or something). It is a great testament to the directing prowess of Tony Scott that this movie could actually get me to care (at least for 107 minutes).

A lot of that credit, of course, has to go towards the screenplay. The film is a very effective introductory primer to racing. The story begins with the construction of the race car itself. Like, literally the empty frame of the car in a garage with Robert Duvall talking to it like a soon-to-be father talking to his wife's pregnant belly. The relationship between Robert Duvall's mechanic and Tom Cruise's driver is brilliantly set up in that the two of them, both good at what they do, don't fully understand what the other one does. They start off butting heads, of course, which leads to some relatively philosophical debates you wouldn't expect to find in a racing movie. For instance, which is most crucial in a race? The performance of the driver or the performance of the vehicle? The answer, of course, is: Neither, it's the connection between the two. Explanations like this are what get us invested in the story.

Midway through the film, after a serious wreck, Nicole Kidman is introduced as a doctor (and the voice of reason) who bluntly delivers the moral of the story to a heretofore confident Cruise: “Control is an illusion.” This, of course, rattles Tom Cruise's character and he has to integrate these new realizations into his racing without it (literally) slowing him down. If all this sounds familiar, it's because it's the basically the same formula as Tony Scott's “Top Gun.”

Like “Top Gun,” the footage and editing of the action sequences are amazing in their ability to present chaos in a way that definitely feels chaotic, but not confusing. That's hard to do. I don't know if they had dozens of cameras in a variety of places (including the participating race cars) filming at the same time or if they just shot the same race over and over and somehow managed to maintain continuity. Neither would surprise me and both are equally impressive.

Impressive as the racing scenes are, though, Tony Scott shows again he's not merely an action director. Rather than simply trying to impress us with the spectacle of fast cars going fast (like the films “Le Mans” and “Grand Prix” did), we're gently sucked into a story about the addictiveness of competition and self-preservation vs. glory. These characters aren't very complicated or, for that matter, interesting outside of their familiarity as caricatures, but we care what happens nonetheless because we've gone with them on this journey. From the construction of the car to its crossing of the finish line and all the speedbumps in between. You don't hafta care about NASCAR to care about this story because that's not just racing. That's life.