Journey to Le Mans

How documentarians always manage to film something when a big event is about to unfold is beyond me. This was a good movie and gave a great inside look into Le Mans.

The direction is decent, however, you don't get the full feel of the races they show or the speed these cars achieve. It could have been aided from the use of Go-Pro or their equivalent in this instance.

I also would have liked to have had more of an inside look into what is JOTA and more background information about the racers,

Only major gripe is the soundtrack is terrible, it belongs in a Disney movie.

When you are a petrolhead, a 'journey to Le Mans' movie will get you interested. And I am a petrolhead, with some Le Mans experience, and I can tell you this is nothing like a Le Mans experience. It really is nothing more than a personal story of the Jota team. Must be great to see for friends and relatives of those involved in the Jota team, but why releasing it to the general public? It puzzles me. Considering it's not that interesting for petrolheads, fairly boring for motorsport enthousiast and straight-out insulting for documentary fans.

Sure, getting Patrick Stewart (needs no introduction) and Tiff Needell (a car journalist) looks good on the poster, but honestly, the Jota LMP2 team is not that interesting. The documentary contains half kind of interviews with those involved, and half clips of racing action. Le Mans Radio audio-clips are edited to the racing video's to make sure you can follow what's going on with the Jota LMP2 team.

The title of this documentary is misleading and don't get your hopes up about it's quality.

Journey to Le Mans is a documentary presenting team Jota's quest to win Le Mans in the LMP2 division.

Much of the race footage is presented in slow motion, and the melodramatic soundtrack is unrelenting. These aspects betray the innate excitement of high-speed racing. The film doesn't even present a summary of the race in any desirable form. I have to believe an under-produced bland documentary would have been much more interesting.

What it does somewhat well is profile the drivers of team Jota. The raw footage is top-notch, alas the actual racing clips are very short.

My one word summary would be "boring", which is a very unfortunate description of the pinnacle of high-speed auto racing.

If you are a car guy skip on this film. The are so many repetitive scenes that it just makes you wonder who put this together. They show the same scene 6 times. How is that possible when you telling a story. The producer cuts from one angle to another and you don't really get to see or enjoy a slow motion shot and on top of that they put a sound effect that clearly doesn't belong but, to make it worse its the same sound effect they just used 3 minutes ago. Also they talk about crashes but fail to show you it and skip to a person talking about it. We want to see the whole scene. Don't tell us what and how it happened, SHOW US. It was poorly thought out and will just get us car guys angry. All you had to do was end the movie with the car going around La'Sarthe for a whole lap and we would of been happy.

Sorry to say that this was not made by petrol heads and it showed. Too many close ups of neatly coiffured blokes and not enough of the engineering or racing. It would have been nice to have a full lap of in car footage, instead we were treated to a succession of close up's of people stood in the garage. The editing was constantly to quick (except when interviewing the frankly bland participants).A number of clips were used on more than one occasion (the exit from the pits behind a Chevrolet for example)which detracted from the continuity. Overall a big disappointment lacking depth and insight, it left me cold. The makers admitted in the question and answer session, following the premier, that they had not seen other racing based films and it showed. There was never any real tension created, even in the crash sequence, and at no time did I connect with the main character. If you are a true motor sport fan best give this limp offering a miss. Sorry.