Narratively, F1: The Movie sets us on the well-worn road of so many sports movies. Here, a rookie racer, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), has plenty of raw talent but none of the experience to wield it properly, prompting a has-been, Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), to come out of a decades-long retirement from Formula One racing in order to show the kid the ropes.
Sonny is brought into the fold by old friend Ruben (Javier Bardem), a former driver turned owner whose team’s poor showings in F1 standings has his board threatening to sell his company out from under him. Naturally, the drivers’ flashy egos clash out of the gate, as the brash young racer bristles at being saddled with an old-timer and Sonny condescends to a rookie who doesn’t have the points to back up his big mouth. As the racers’ drama spills out onto the track, Sonny’s aggressive style costs both him and Josh as much as it gains them.
This simple premise keeps the focus mostly on the action, and the film is considerably elevated by Joseph Kosinski’s direction. As they did with the aerial maneuvering in Top Gun: Maverick, the director and his longtime cinematographer, Claudio Miranda, favor edge-stretching wide-angle lenses that convey the experience of G-force pressure while operating exceedingly fast vehicles. They also make clever use of a recurring trick of setting an externally mounted camera on a swivel so that a shot facing outward as a car zooms along the track suddenly turns around and points at the driver, as if the wind resistance built up knocked the camera backwards.
Intriguingly, Stephen Mirrione’s editing most often uses quick cuts not on the driving itself but in the reactions of audiences and pit crews perking up at a particularly daring (or just plain bewildering) move from one of the drivers. This strategy keeps up a breakneck momentum during the race sequences while allowing the actual shots of driving breathe enough to let the audience follow the constant transitions between cars roaring down straight stretches of track and sudden, hairpin turns at curves. This also permits the audience to pick up on the method in Sonny’s madness as his ostensibly reckless, borderline violent behavior against rival drivers causes delays and pile-ups that allow him and Josh to creep up leaderboards.
The film also devotes much attention to the team aspect of F1 racing, from the begrudging alliance forged between Sonny and Josh to the interplay between operations and pit crews. Bearing at times helpless witness to Sonny and Josh’s bickering is the team crew, led by principal Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia) and technical director Kate McKenna (Kate Condon). Some of the film’s most thrilling moments home in on the observation box where Kate and Kaspar make split-second strategy decisions to keep their drivers in sync, or the dizzying speed with which the pit crew refurbishes a seemingly wrecked vehicle and getting it back on the track.
F1 also focuses on the impressive level of engineering and testing that goes into vehicle design and refinement, with Kate frequently hunched over advanced simulation models as she programs possible improvements to the cars just to shave a fraction of a second off of laps. F1 has enjoyed a major profile boost among non-racing aficionados in recent years thanks to efforts like the Netflix’s Drive to Survive, but not even that documentary series communicates the manner in which every element of a race team must work together with lightning-fast reflexes to place in a grand prix. (Less visible, at least at first, are the corporate stakes in this world, but the tensions at play between a racer’s competitive spirit and personal ambitions and the interests of bankrolling entities do add an element of frisson that builds to a head in the final act.)
In the end, F1 succeeds for many of the same reasons that Top Gun: Maverick does: for elevating familiar material with old-school filmmaking swagger. In both films, a still-capable legend and a hungry young lion come to respect one another, with the torch passed between them doing more to reaffirm the singular, inimitable properties of the older figure supposedly stepping out of the limelight. And in F1, Edris imbues Josh with enough charisma and ambition to suggest that he may indeed outshine his unlikely teammate before it’s all said and done.
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