Nobody drives forever

F1

2025

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Written by Ehren Kruger and Joseph Kosinski

Spoilers: moderate

Now, I ought to disclose I got into F1 late, and in what might or might not be an irony, it was as a result of some foolish combination of going running in 100-degree weather, a slight miscalibration of my usual nicotine intake, and a really nauseating car ride to the theater—all of which, it turns out, are things the movie's about, hence the possible irony (the car ride being, I imagine, self-explanatory, whilst its hero doesn't let being in Las Vegas or Abu Dhabi stop him from jogging, and even the nicotine thing is reflected in the nastiest crash in the movie, a flashback involving some well-manipulated stock footage from when F1 cars were blurry cigarette advertisements)—and altogether it made me a little too ill to do complex tasks like "show my phone to the ticket taker" or "stand up" for a few minutes.  What this means, besides revealing what a wacky piece of crap I am, is that I missed the first scene, which is a big race at the 24 Hours of Daytona, which for one thing goes towards explaining how its winner, 50-something "Sonny" Hayes (Brad Pitt), could possibly get hired to race Formula One for his old friend Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), which is the premise of the movie so I'd accept it anyway, but is also—according to some reports—the best race that F1 ever gives us, which would be undeniably ironic, given that it's in a different sport than the title.

But maybe this was a boon, because even if the Daytona race is the best thing the movie ever does car-wise (and I'll find out sooner rather than later because, to make my position on F1 clear, I love it), I didn't watch a movie where its first scene was its best scene and so didn't spend any time comparing its subsequent racing sequences to a better racing sequence, or wondering why F1's about F1.  Still, I can't dismiss the possibility that I might've, since taken purely as a matter of car cinema F1 is... very, very good, and maybe not entirely all the way to great.  I'm not entirely sure what it's missing in that regard (I'll take some stabs at it), though the efforts taken by its makers, director Joseph Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, are pretty unimpeachable ones.  They begin just by virtue of them being Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer.

Bruckheimer, of course, is the legendary impresario (or at least one-half of a legendary duo, but Don Simpson's been dead for some time) who brought us Days of Thunder, which for me would very easily make the shortest possible list of best racing films ever made, and Bruckheimer ensured F1 would be made using similar methods except moreso: filming on real racetracks with real racecars driven by real racecar drivers, basically following the teams around during the 2023 and 2024 seasons* and using them as extras during practices and warm-ups (though not during actual races), so that the immense scale of the sport is made as tangible as possible, from the formations to the crowds to the globe-spanning series of countries they take place in; the difference is that in one respect Bruckheimer and Kosinski exceeded Days of Thunder, because Days of Thunder still used stand-in drivers, but, even if in this age of VFX you could readily get away with it (and, indeed, the more open the shots of the races are, the likelier it is that our hero cars are composited in, even if you can only sometimes tell, because that can be actual race footage), Bruckheimer and Kosinski made a genuine attempt to avoid stand-ins as much as possible, and make their movie as real as possible.  They used the production's own racecars (albeit F2 cars, for reasons probably having a little something to do with the two orders of magnitude difference in their costs), driven by the production's own stars, who were asked to drive these machines at a level at least sufficient to convincingly pretend that they're driving them at the level of the best drivers on planet Earth, for example another producer here (and de facto technical advisor) and a notional participant in this movie's fictional races, Lewis Hamilton.  (The stars were also around for just a ton of pick-ups around the stadiums, which is frankly as important as the driving for the immersion.  It doesn't even end at the races, either, with McLaren donating their dizzyingly huge and modernist Technology Center in Woking as the headquarters of our fictional racing team.  Hell, there's a "nightclub" that reminds you that Kosinski made his name with the limitless black-and-neon world inside a computer in TRON: Legacy, and it sure doesn't seem like it should be real, but it's the Omnia in Vegas.  It's an awfully hefty movie, visually.)

If this reminds you of anything, it's because these were the production methods used by the other half of my shortest possible list of best racing films ever made, Grand Prix, putting James Garner and company on the track and their cameras in the cars.  I didn't mention that F1's F2 cars are simply lousy with cameras, but that's certainly why Kosinski and Bruckheimer would team up for this particular project, since the director and the producer just got finished doing basically the same thing with F-18s on Top Gun: Maverick, except on that they didn't let the actors drive.  We'll circle back to Kosinski, but until F1, Grand Prix reigned for six decades without being seriously challenged as the highest-profile Formula One movie, and I don't suppose F1 will ever overtake it; without even comparing them in any other way, Grand Prix is, to a certainty, the better racing movie qua racing movie.  Some of this is its plot; some of it, I think, is just the geography of the tracks that are being exploited for F1, which have a noticeable tendency towards the kind of flatness where if you weren't aware of their contours ahead of time (F1 is, not necessarily as a negative thing, edging perilously close to "fans-only" territory) you wouldn't even know there's about to be a turn, which is as likely to briefly disengage you as it is to be an effective surprise; and some of it is, because Formula One is slightly arcane, with rules and strategy more complex than "motherfuckers drive real fast," it sees fit to enlist F1 announcers to constantly explain why said motherfuckers are driving in this or that particular way, and if you find their exposition annoying, then I regret to tell you it takes till the last stretch of the last race before it ever gets better.  (Though this is a beautiful work of emptying out the sound mix to instill within you the same sensation of zen felt by our protagonist.)  For my part, I didn't find their yakkin' too terribly unwelcome—the constancy means it's simply "what this movie is like," rather than a wrenching interruption—and for every instance where they're just audio describing what you can make out perfectly well on your own, there will be some F1 nonsense (and it can be nonsense) that probably does bear explaining to an American non-fan.  (There are also instances where it's still wholly opaque despite an explanation, hence that "fans-only" proximity.) So I think the prime factor keeping F1 more of a good-than-great racing movie is that our heroes are racing, in a certain sense, against nobody: there's no big adversary, just twenty ciphers (even Hamilton!) in twenty other F1 cars, and while this surely reveals what an American non-fan I am, I daresay that F1 cars have a hard time achieving a visual personality, especially when you mainly see them from the front or back.

But I do not wish the perfect (that is, Grand Prix or Days of Thunder) to be the implacable enemy of the good, and this is awfully good, and can be great (it's a quality I believe I'll appreciate even more on rewatch), once you realize that "dramatizing a competition" is not really the goal of this sports film, and that the shot design enforced by two actor-drivers driving around the tracks works for this movie's actual goal of being about those actor-drivers' characters, their relationships, and the always-mysterious compulsion that makes anyone propel themselves at 200mph towards a feeling they would always struggle to define.  (It's actually slightly notorious already how much Kosinski is leaning on one camera in particular, and on one particular movement of it—a big pan rotating in clean, precise 90 or 180 degree chunks from the front or side back to the driver's face—but it is incredibly cool how this means there's no cut between the action and what would, in another circumstance, be an insert shot, which does get us scraping against greatness, just in a different register.)

What this leaves unacknowledged is how much this racing movie is shots of its stars' faces, or rather, with their faces obscured, just its stars' eyes, a subject typically still relative to anything else inside the frame, and hence how much this movie wants you to minutely study those still-visible eyes, and not just in the "check out these G-forces!" geekshow vein of Maverick, but privileging the performances even when more "objective" footage might've been the more adrenaline-soaked decision.  Meanwhile, Kosinski has indeed built F1 directly off his experience with Maverick, inasmuch as that was also a movie very much created in the editing suite, and F1 is the same in principle, a zillion hours of footage carved down into a rumination on how machinery might serve men.  Kosinski's editorial partner this time was Stephen Mirrione, an editor so insightful Steven Soderbergh has used him more than half a dozen times, and on no less than some of his very best, coolest films, which should say something given Soderbergh often doesn't mind doing the job himself—though for obvious reasons it's much more controllable than in Maverick, which has its own rewards, including simply greater clarity.  (It's pulled together from some nice photography, too, from Kosinski's go-to Claudio Miranda, and what he gives us, now that he's not asked to emulate a hugely-specific, hard-to-replicate 80s aesthetic, is some very clean imagery whose chiefest purpose, like much else here, is realism.  If nothing else, it's one gratifyingly normal color grade for 2025, but it's got a lovely subtleness to it that makes it cinematic, without being what you'd ordinarily mean by describing digital cinematography as "filmic.")  As far as effect goes, the sleekly-technological aesthetic that Kosinski's been pursuing throughout his career meets Mirrione's Ocean's-trained snappy-floatiness to create a sensation of a movie that doesn't even quite have "scenes," but instead constantly flows into and out of experiences of speed, so that at 155 minutes F1 feels a solid forty minutes shorter than it is.  (Okay, I missed the first ten, but what I missed was a reputedly-awesome racing sequence, so I'm comfortable with the assertion.)  There's a flashiness to it—an enthusiasm for jump cuts, and a splitscreen montage that's as much an acknowledgment of its debt to Grand Prix as anything else—but more than pyrotechnics, what we have is a movie that moves in rare alignment with its protagonists.

So do we have a plot?  Sure!  As I said, Sonny—who thirty years ago had the juice for Formula One until he quantum leapt into Martin Donnelly's body and almost died (that's the stock footage I mentioned) and has been wandering around from sport to sport ever since—is hired by Ruben, the general manager of technology-firm-and-racing-team APXGP (pronounced "Apex GP" and, accordingly, never not slightly grating).  This is pure desperation (as his cutely-written introduction to his new coworkers makes clear, Sonny is not their first choice), for APXGP is in such financial trouble that if it doesn't do really well this season, it's over.  Sonny's arrival is met with bafflement by the three-ring accent circus of Ruben's polyglot team, manifesting as a more chagrined amusement from APXGP's technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), but as borderline-outraged hostility from its present "star" driver, young Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), so that one of the curious small problems of F1 is that it's a 155 minute film that still sees a need to escalate a workplace feud to "do you want to be punched in the face?" levels more-or-less immediately.  However, Pitt's star turn (keeping up that Ocean's connection, Sonny is almost actionably close to Rusty Ryan, down to key character embroidery) ensures that his reaction is mostly just flippant cool.  He is, however, a demanding and egocentric driver, almost psychotically insistent on getting his way, but this starts to work out for APXGP, especially as he begins effectively running their race strategy and exploiting the rules, for instance triggering three safety cars with semi-minor incidents in a single race.  I've seen differing opinions on this, but the consensus from F1 aficionados seems to be that the first "act" of this semi-actless film is pretty goofy F1-wise, from trivialities of licensure to the more serious issue that Sonny is essentially cheating, or at least pulling bullshit; the weirder thing might not be that his rule-bending works, but that it makes him hugely popular, despite the fact that it seems like he's actively fucking up the race-watching experience.  But who knows, maybe such extreme unsportingness would be considered smart.

The teammate Joshua perceives as a decrepit old man thereby becomes the bad boy of Formula One, and F1's "plot," with pretty much its entire effectiveness resting upon it, is just the dynamic between these two men.  For all that Kosinski is a director of technological spectacles, it can be forgotten that he can be awfully good at character dynamics; even so, this is some genuinely sophisticated stuff that I wouldn't have expected from this filmmaker even if I had remembered.  His and Ehren Kruger's screenplay diligently provides the temperamental and philosophical differences between Sonny and Joshua, and it's even interesting about it—Sonny is old-school almost to the point of parody, in touch with the machinery and the tracks in a truly physical way, hence all those scenes of Pitt jogging the circuits, and he doesn't even care about his newfound fans; Joshua, of course, is a 21st century digital boy, technological and mediated, and maintains a manicured social media presence that nevertheless excites nobody—but what's honestly clever about F1 is how it's using its leading men to explicate that character dynamic without even necessarily needing them to do any acting, even if I think they're both giving excellent performances, especially Pitt.  But that's exactly it: of course Pitt's "the star" whereas hopefully it'd be forgivable to not even know who Idris is, but even if there is much legitimate acting here (there's an entire quiet thing about Sonny's dad, starting with how he's named "Sonny," that is the subject of maybe two lines but is clearly a big part of this character), the movie is basically bending itself around Pitt and the effortless ease with which he essays this Rusty Ryan/Tyler Durden mashup, and thus the virtually automatic ways he draws you in (and, more to the point, draws everyone inside the movie in) to the orbit of his charisma despite the very evident fact that Sonny is a hippie and a fuckup and driversplains shit like "turbulence" to an ex-aerospace engineer that she'd have to be pretty ridiculously stupid not to have considered herself, so that pretty soon everytime we return to Idris, overshadowed in his own movie like Sonny has overshadowed Joshua in his own profession, it's exactly as automatic that our sympathies switch instantly to him, even though he's sort of an asshole.  After all, this asshole's still right, and it's not fair.  It's a rather interesting way to pursue a two-hander acted across two hugely distinct levels of starpower, though I'm sure going to keep an eye on Idris going forward.

And maybe it's all typeage—Condon, for her part, is outstanding at a substantially-less-thankless version of her function from The Banshees of Inisherin—but it means that instead of a plot, it's got a story, which is even better, with both of our drivers' personalities intelligently presented (often quite amusingly, too, which helps, even with sometimes placeholdery-feeling banter), while each prove more permeable than they might've seemed at first glance.  What it's got even beyond a story, though, is a vibe, which fills up all these 155 minutes of what is—I perhaps ought to have mentioned this earlier—one incredibly corny movie.  That vibe and its nature are recognized early and often by the soundtrack, and by Hans Zimmer and Steve Mazarro's score, a score that does get dangerously close to "variations on one single composition," but it's a pretty great composition (somehow meditative and urgent, it sounds like Kosinski asked Zimmer if he could do Daft Punk's TRON: Legacy and he said "sure, if I can put Inception and Harold Faltermeyer's Top Gun in it too," and doesn't, oddly, sound much like Zimmer's Days of Thunder or like Zimmer's Rush), and the music gets at the synthesis of Sonny and Joshua that's the heart of that vibe, a vibe of sufficient warmth (and of sufficient cool) that it winds up in a miraculous place for a movie to be as it enters its final stretch, where it feels like any of the various ways it could end would be the perfect choice to encapsulate its ethos and its characters' fractious friendship.  And then it comes full circle in a way that's even more perfect, suggesting that what we've just watched was an inspirational ghost story about the spirit of motorsports.  I know I'm off-consensus about Kosinski's last film, but I've never shut up about how Maverick had no damn vibe.  F1 is the movie I wanted Maverick to be.

Score: 9/10

*F1 was one of the films most seriously affected by the SAG-AFTRA strike, which is why I won't poke too hard at a budget that some reports peg at around $300 million, because it still doesn't look like that.