NEED FOR SPEED

So last night, like many other car fans and NFS franchise fans, I saw the Need for Speed movie, and quite frankly, I did not find it to be as bad as everyone else on the internet said it was going to be. The script and the story were just as cheesy and predictable as any of the Fast & Furious movies or that awful Redline movie from a few years back. I did like how they used very few visual effects and apparently NO CGI whatsoever. I heard that and spent a great deal of the movie looking for some kind of CGI, but I couldn't. I was very impressed by that. I also loved that the car sounds weren't dubbed with better sounding cars, but rather Magnaflow made custom exhausts for every single car in the movie, making them sound perfect, especially the Gran Torino, Camaro, and GTO in the first race scene. There are some things that bothered me though. The jump scene in the Mustang...it was quite obvious it was a stunt modified Mustang. Obviously it needed to be because the Mustangs used in the chase scenes would've been to screwed up to reuse if they didn't put a rally style suspension and narrower, bigger tires that would've survived the jump enough to make it look legitimate. They just did a terrible job at hiding what they did. Also, I understand they did this for entertainment value and because they had a $66 million check from Dreamworks burning a hole in their pockets, but I'm not sure it was completely necessary to destroy six multi-million dollar cars. Lets make a list of the cars that they destroyed and their costs.

Bugatti Veyron SS: $2.2 million
Lamborghini Sesto Elemento: $2.5 million
Koenigsegg Agera R (one destroyed and one severely cosmetically damaged): $1.6 million each
Saleen S7 TT: $1 million to the right customer (I've seen them go for more or less)
GTA Spano: $800,000
Mclaren P1: $1.15 million

Total cost: $9.25 million in damages

I enjoy gratuitous destruction of expensive things, it just seems kind of risky to put this much into a movie that already had bad critique before it was released. Also, the product placement was fairly tasteful. It was clear Ford put a lot into this movie, even giving them a 15 Mustang for the final scene, but it wasn't nearly as bad as a Michael Bay movie or a Marvel movie where it is constantly in your face. For the NFS movie, it was there, but you could easily ignore it. My final thought on this movie is that besides Rush, this was the best racing movie I've seen in a while. Made more sense then a Fast & Furious movie, the videography was excellent, and the cars were some of the best I've scene on the big screen. I'm hoping that the mix of The Run and Hot Pursuit reignites peoples' love for the game franchise because I've been playing them since I can remember and I'd really hate to see them gone.

Now, I just wanted to talk about the car the grabbed my attention most in the movie and the one I found to be the breakout automotive star, the GTA Spano. Its been around since 2010 and I've seen it around the web, but I've really not paid much attention to it and I also don't know anything about it other then it was made in Spain. I decided to do some research and learn about it.

Its made of a carbon fiber, titanium, and Kevlar mixture, has a "Central rear lonitudinally-mounted supercharged V10". So rear engined, rear wheel drive and fast with 840 HP running on bio-ethanol. I think its a beautiful car and I feel ashamed that I never paid enough attention to it in the four years that its already been available.

I also wanted to give a brief history of the NFS franchise in the hopes in will reignite someone's love for the series. This year actually marks the 20th anniversary of the NFS franchise with The Need for Speed being released in 1994 for PC and PS1 and featured 8 licensed cars ranging from a Toyota Supra to the Ferrari 512 and a secret ninth non-licensed vehicle called The Warrior. There were some sequels that added some fundamental developments in the series with the pursuits and driving engines. In 2000, Porsche Unleashed was released and this started the long-lasting relationship with Porsche. Starting in 2010, EA had exclusive rights to use Porsche's name in video games, leaving other franchises to use RUF as an alternative without paying Porsche and EA a hefty sum. In 2004, Underground 2 came out which opened up the franchise to a whole new demographic of car lover that enjoys customizing non-super cars for street racing, although their were no cops which many always found disappointing, though that was fixed in 2005 when the most popular game in the franchise was released, Most Wanted and then the follow-up the next year with Carbon and in 2008, the final game in that storyline, Undercover, which was never really popular. The Shift titles were EA's attempt and competing with Forza and Gran Turismo which didn't work as they'd planned, and thus began the decline in popularity of the the NFS series. With a rebooted Hot Pursuit in 2010 that barely sold and a rebuilt Most Wanted title in 2012 that got terrible reviews all around, my hopes for the continuation of Need for Speed died. While The Run in 2011 sold fairly well and did well with critics, it didn't make up for the failures the years before and after. In 2013, the world got Rivals, a whole new concept in Need for Speed, pitting cops against racers and racers against cops as more then just soldiers fighting against the lines separating right and wrong, but as two organizations fighting in a personal vendetta to destroy the other one. This plus the online open world where you jump in and meet other racers from around the world right away made for a great game, and it gave me hopes that with Rivals and the movie, the franchise will live to see another generation of car fan.