I will preface the following remarks with the disclaimer that I know almost nothing about auto racing, race cars, or what distinguishes Formula One from any other type of racing. I know that it's not a casual sport, with most of the cars and teams being sponsored by major auto manufacturers with deep pockets. And fortunately, this is pretty much all you need to know going into "F1," aka "F1 the Movie."
Joseph Kosinski has proven that the success of "Top Gun: Maverick" wasn't a fluke, and he's done it by making a film that establishes a pretty clear pattern of how Kosinski makes a hit. You make a movie in a nearly extinct action sub-genre, put an aging movie star at its center, have the story be about passing the torch and one last shot at glory, and pretty the whole thing up with cutting edge movie effects to amp up the spectacle. It's not just a matter of putting Brad Pitt into an F1 racing movie, but boiling all the tropes of racing movies down to their most basic forms and presenting them in a shiny new package. The version of F1 we see depicted onscreen is very idealized - women and minorities are conspicuously represented - as the U.S. Air Force was in "Top Gun: Maverick," with any political or cultural barriers to entry only vaguely alluded to. And since the movie couldn't have been made without the participation of the FIA, the governing body of F1, that's no surprise.
I'm also certain that the racing itself doesn't remotely resemble what actually happens on a real Formula One race track. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a maverick racer-for-hire who is constantly using dangerous tricks and stratagems to gain an advantage. He's recruited by an old racing teammate, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), as a last ditch effort to save the floundering newbie APXGP team, which Ruben bankrolls. The team's other primary driver is the talented, but green Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). They also have the risk-averse Kaspar Smolinski (Kim Bodnia) as team principal, and F1's first female technical director, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), in charge of the cars. Sonny joins the team and promptly clashes with all of them, but also provokes them to do better. We watch as they figure out how to work together over the course of an eventful season, chasing victory despite many defeats and setbacks. There are injuries, disqualifications, ghosts of the past, and plenty of interpersonal frictions. There's also a secret saboteur in the mix, naturally.
The pieces of the movie are all very artificial and very familiar, but this isn't a bad thing. All the old tropes work to the film's benefit, and "F1" turned out to be exactly what I wanted in a summer movie blockbuster. The performances, the filmmaking, and the execution of all the predictable twists and turns are fantastic. "F1" is absolutely the kind of movie that you want to see on the biggest screen possible to really immerse yourself in the experience of watching all those beautifully staged race sequences where the cars are barrelling down the track at unfathomable speeds. There's a first person POV sequence in the last race that is downright breathtaking to behold, and DP Claudio Miranda should be up for every cinematography award in a few months. The script is bare bones and the characters even moreso, but you buy that Sonny Hayes is getting away with all of this because it's Brad Pitt, looking as handsome and charming as ever. And Javier Bardem is a pro at making the implausible behind-the-scenes troubles seem plausible, because he's terribly convincing every time he announces that something else has gone wrong.
"F1" is a sports movie, but it's also a process movie. What I appreciated the most was getting an up-close and detailed look at the cars and the racing, even if much of it was romanticized and cleaned up for the silver screen. Half of what sells the racing is spending so much time with dedicated professionals behind the scenes who are obsessed with improving their race times by mere tenths of a second. It's sitting in on strategy meetings, board meetings, and press conferences. It's watching APXGP lose race after race, but learning a little bit more each time. Kosinski embraces being a maximalist storyteller, and ensures that the sizable budget is well spent. Unlike a lot of other movies this summer, you can see every dollar onscreen. "F1" is also a long movie, but it earns its running time, and in the end the filmmakers earn the happy ending that could only happen in the movies.
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