Started watching this TV series for Keanu Reeves, who is doing the interviews and narrating the documentary. Stayed for the overall documentary and story.
In other documentaries of this type, the interviewer is not usually in the frame, so you could wonder if this series is compromising something of the focus on the subjects by including the interviewer as much as it does. But Keanu - with his love of motorbikes and racing - is an affable and enthusiastic host. You can see people warming up to him, and when you watch his empathetic reactions to what they're saying, you can understand how they would. He's no distraction from the interviewees. In fact warming them up means we, the audience, get more of an insight into their experiences. And Keanu's knowlegeable about the sport, but also reacts in a very human, accessible way to what he's hearing.
In fact sometimes he does some especially graceful things that I really like to see. For instance, Hiroshi Oshima, Honda Motorsports Managing Officer is trying to find the words to describe his feelings about "selling" the original team for a pound to Ross Brawn. But he says that it's very hard to do that in English. Keanu says: "In Japanese", inviting him to speak in the language he's fluent in instead.
If you're multilingual, and speaking outside your first language, I think you can understand that feeling of not being able to find the words in a different tongue. You can see how much more emotion people sometimes feel and express when they're able to speak freely in their own language, and this is the case here too. The interviewee is able to express himself more fully and the viewer is able to get a deeper understanding in the process. Plus of course there's always subtitles for everyone watching this at home.
Keanu, being as affable as he is, is not the sort of character who needs to center himself constantly, and in fact, he almost never does. And over time the inherent drama of the story speaks for itself. It's that old tale: will this underdog sport team survive a large array of challenges and even thrive?
Motorsports are not really my thing - they're so far away from ordinary life, that I see them a bit like high fashion. An escape from the everyday world. Something that involves huge sums of money, highly engineered, luxury objects, and entire teams of people who dedicate themselves entirely to the single purpose of creating something that most ordinary people will never even get to touch in their daily lives.
Not really my cuppa tea. I get bored seeing cars going round and round a circuit if I actually try to watch the sport. But I do enjoy documentaries about it that go into the challenges of the engineering, or the experience of the drivers, or the politics in the sport, and so on. All the contextual layers that you probably don't see if you're just watching cars go round and round a track. On that level, this documentary does a really good job.
Plus there's still footage of cars going round and round a track, and also the driver's camera view, all set to stirring music. I mean, if you are into the sport I think you will enjoy this a lot. If you are not into the sport (like me), but you also enjoy getting a look into a totally different world from your own (like me), then you will soon get sucked into this story too. The last episode in particular is full of especially warm, human moments. Would recommend.
