With his star racer (Damson Idris) and his team in trouble, a flailing owner (Javier Bardem) recruits a veteran ex-racer (Brad Pitt) to give them the edge they need…
There is a part of me that wants to love F1. This feels like the kind of movie I would go watch in the nineties with my parents.
Right from the first shot, a sweeping wide descending from the heavens toward a racing track, I was in.
The moment the title card hit, bolstered by Hans Zimmer’s title theme, I was in love.
I do not know anything about Formula One. I never cared about cars.
As sheer spectacle, this movie hooked me.
Kind of like Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick, this movie makes physical human endeavour and incredibly dangerous machines the site of spectacle.
While there are probably a lot of computer-generated or enhanced elements, F1 feels tactile.
If this movie was just about showing the races, it would still be watchable. I almost wish it was just that.
It is impossible not to treat this movie as another step in Brad Pitt’s rehabilitation campaign after the domestic violence allegations against him.
There is a chill to Pitt here, a distance that both works for the character’s disenchantment, and against the story’s attempts to humanise him.
He is also just too old.
The story is familiar - a veteran racer is brought in to help a young tyro and they join forces to overcome. But for where the story goes, he is just way, way too old.
There is an old-fashioned quality to the story that I have seen a lot of people criticise.
I felt the other way.
By the end of the movie, it becomes clear that the character has already experienced that growth offscreen - once his work is done, he leaves ala the title character in Shane, to race another day.
That kind of main character, one who does not change, but instead changes those around him, is something we do not see a lot of in contemporary blockbusters - there is more of a compulsion to centre the main character’s growth.
There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not the only way of telling a story.
That main character-as-catalyst makes the latter parts of the movie kind of interesting, but it also feels like a metaphor for the lack of new movie stars to anchor new movies - and because of Pitt's casting, it also feels like a lead weight.
The lack of new movie stars means people like Pitt continue to take up space.
The movie has been a relative success (relative the massive $300m budget), and I am hoping it’s success will give Kosinski and the studios encouragement to pursue this kind of large-scale four-quad entertainment more often.
Sadly that success means Pitt gets to endure as a star.
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