‘F1 the Movie’ goes nowhere with speed and spectacle

2 weeks ago 10

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I’ve never cared about auto racing. Sure, there was a brief time in the 90’s when racing reached the larger cultural zeitgeist and I tried watching Nascar, Formula 1, and off-road races on ESPN before deciding they weren’t for me. Every race would start with a burst of speed and adrenaline until, inevitably, settling into the tedium of hours of driving around the same track over and over again, finally/mercifully ending with a mad rush to, hopefully, an exciting finish. Despite the marketable personalities and obvious skill of the drivers, it always seemed like the “sport” was less about people than technology. Where traditional sports test the human limits of strength, agility, endurance, and speed, auto racing just has fast cars going fast. Sure there’s plenty of spectacle but it’s all meaningless. Millions of dollars and gallons of gasoline, immeasurable amounts of exhaust and waste, all so rich people and corporations can brag that their impractical car is faster than the other impractical cars. It looks neat. It has its own drama and skill. But it’s still just hours spent driving fast and going nowhere.

Opening on a flashback to the last time auto racing was culturally relevant, F1 the Movie shows us a horrible crash before dashing off to the present and the 24 Hours of Daytona, an agonizingly wasteful event where sixty-one cars spend an entire day driving in a circle. Here we meet Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) as he fusses over his team surrendering a lead he’d left them before taking his shift spending an entire night driving in a circle. Like so many of Pitt’s recent characters, Hayes is both world-weary – granted the wisdom of years of experience and hundreds of mistakes – and cocky – granted the comfort of knowing that none of these mistakes have been his last, yet. It’s Pitt’s ageless charisma that fuels the film, likely aided by his own amassed regrets and lost opportunities. Yet under the Daytona lights of this sequence we become aware of a far greater engine at work: director Joseph Kosinki. (I promise that will be the last automotive metaphor I intentionally use in this review. There’s a different idea I’m circling back to.)

After the surprisingly massive success of Top Gun: Maverick, and the utter disappointment of Spiderhead, Kosinski emerged as the most obvious choice for another film about speed, machines, and a 60-year-old man coming out of obscurity to show the young people the right way of doing things. As with Maverick’s dog fights, the racing sequences of F1 are utterly spectacular. Cars slide from side to side on the track, angle for position, navigate through traffic, spin out, and crash, all with unimaginable levels of force. Superior camera work captures the intensity on both Hayes and Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) as they jostle in place and focus on a sort of high-speed nirvana. Although not particularly stylish, Kosinki is a master at the essential elements of film: tension, composition, lighting, movement, and even, at times, character relationships. Thin as they may be both Hayes and Pearce are believable figures within this world, with Pitt and Idris admirably embodying their archetypes. Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon add weight to otherwise flat supporting characters. It’s this potent combination of a simple premise, skilled acting, and tense, pulse-pounding visuals which make F1 the Movie enjoyable even to those who have never liked racing. Even with characters so broadly drawn that we don’t know the name of Kerry Condon’s character until the credits (it’s Kate) and a screenplay so rudimentary that it’s obvious which lines of dialog will return – like an F1 driver around a course, or the central theme of this review – it’s impossible not to get caught up in F1’s wonderfully crafted moments. Like Maverick, F1 is classic spectacle filmmaking updated to the present. Where distraction sets in, however, is in the details.

One of these details is the thinness of the characters. Beyond Hayes, Pearce, and Rufus (Bardem), none of the character seem to be referred by name. Kerry Condon, familiar as the smartest person in The Banshees of Inisherin, stands out as the feature of maybe four women in the entire cast including Ted Lasso’s Sarah Niles playing Pearce’s mom (only once referred to as “Bernadette”), brunette PR lady, and blonde pit crew lady, who circles around a subplot without going anywhere. As a result, F1 imitates its titular event by starting off strong before settling into tedium. The plot tries to add new elements but ends up just delaying the obvious ending. Fortunately that ending is extraordinarily well-crafted, with each of the film’s sign-posted themes coming together.

However, the shallowness of the film’s plot and characters make it clear that, again, like its… sport… F1 is much more about machines than the men who race them. The script might give literal lip service to the idea that the driver is more important than the car, but the film itself is a clear case of technology being the real star. In short, while our interest in the characters might make the film’s several race sequences more engaging, it’s the racing itself which is the main attraction. No one goes to an F1 race to see the drivers talk. They go for the cars. The same is true for F1 the Movie. Pitt, Bardem, and Condon have their appeal, but this movie isn’t about them. It doesn’t help that the only stakes are whether or not an unfathomably wealthy corporation will maintain competition with other unfathomably wealthy corporations.

Mentioning that Bardem’s APX GC racing team spent 150 million dollars building a car doesn’t intensify risk so much as emphasize the sheer amount of money, fuel, and effort wasted on driving fast and going nowhere. In a time when people all around the world are struggling with rising food prices, utility bills, and housing expenses, it’s hard to sympathize with people who have more money than they have things to buy with that money. Resources may be unlimited for these people, but they’re painfully limited for so many others. With F1’s core audience of dads and grandpas poised to lose the healthcare they spent their entire lives working for, a 150 million dollar car draped in luxury brand logos doesn’t make us invest in the characters.

And yet again, like its namesake, there are times when F1 feels less like human or even mechanical drama than a massive ad service, along with every other professional sport. Race sequences are littered with logos and brand names: Tommy Hilfinger, Expensiffy, and Shark Nenja fill every inch of team uniforms; Purelli tires are everywhere; Corruypto.com, Qatar Airlines, Rolax, Eithad, and Aramko clutter the racetrack; and Mercedes Bens and Furrari serve as the rivals of APX GC. Meanwhile, brands like Porscha and Geiko only paid enough to feature in the opening sequence. And yes, all of those names are misspelled, because I’m not getting paid to advertise for them. This obviously adds to the verisimilitude of the project, especially considering direct involvement from the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile itself, but it’s hard not to notice just how prominent corporate logos are. Curiously, despite being an Apple+ production, its own logo is absent while both Androd and Amazone Web Services make an appearance. Although, with an estimated budget in excess of 300 million dollars, it’s obvious why F1 needs to fill the screen with so much corporate sponsorship that we eventually don’t notice and the glut of logos becomes pointless. It’s just a pity that for all that money, for all that effort, the film effectively goes nowhere.

The irony of F1 being produced by a streaming service is that this film requires the cinematic experience. Like Maverick before it, the roar of an engine and the rush of wind shear won’t sound the same at home. The unfortunate part is that beyond two and a half hours of spectacle, F1 doesn’t contribute anything to our cultural understanding. The closest thing to a statement seems to be the superiority of old ideas over new ones.

We’re shown time and time again how Hayes’s old school methods are greater than Pearce’s modern optimization. It’s sit-ups in a hotel room over a personalized regime with a trainer. It’s bouncing tennis balls over reflex machines. It’s jogging around the track over high intensity cardio. It’s classic male stoicism over expressing discomfort. What is meant to be a message about prioritizing passion comes off as complaining kids these days are always on their phone, complete with an actual monologue about the emptiness of social media. While we may agree, and may enjoy seeing Hayes bring some grit to the team’s sterile professionalism, it doesn’t help that F1 depicts an older white man showing a Black man and a woman the error of their ways. The subject matter already made this a “dad” movie, the statement is sure to make him feel proud of himself. Thankfully a nice “elbows up” reference saves the film from going full “make racing great again.”

Despite its many problems, F1 is a well-crafted and highly entertaining movie. Kosinki once again demonstrates that he knows how to please a crowd. F1, both the movie and the sport, is a simple concept complicated by the technology necessary for it to exist. For all our advancement, we remain simple creatures. We like fast cars. We like loud noises. We like movie stars and glamour. We like feeling as though we are in danger without being in danger. We like being told we’re right. F1 gives us things we like.

Yet, for all its technical prowess and opulence and spectacle, once the race ends all that remains for F1, both the movie and the sport, is hours spent driving fast and going nowhere.