“There’s a point, 7,000 RPM, where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless — just disappears. All that’s left is a body moving through space and time.” This is an iconic dialogue from James Mangold’s Ford Vs Ferrari, which pretty much carried the emotion around which the movie was built. It was the love for machines and the idea of racing. F1, the latest Joseph Kosinski film, has a line from the hero similar to the one from the 2019 flick. And this movie is also about the passion that drives these Formula One teams to strive for excellence. With almost every character having some kind of redemption arc, F1 shows you the nuances of the idea of winning, even though there are no dramatic shifts in storytelling.
APX Grand Prix is a relatively new F1 team. They are yet to finish a single race in the current season, and the season is halfway done. The main man of the team, ex-F1 racer Ruben, reaches out to his old mate Sonny Hayes, a good racer who had to leave F1 at a really early stage. What we see in the movie F1 is the mid-season entry of Hayes into the team and how that changes the dynamics inside the team, especially with his rookie teammate Joshua Pearce.
I am not a real nerd when it comes to F1. However, I have enough random ambient viewing experience of watching Drive to Survive that I am sort of familiar with the traits of this sporting event. The good thing about F1 is the fact that, much like its name, it gives focus to the idea of F1 racing. F1 is not a one-man show, even though the driver is getting all the attention. Writer Ehren Kruger shows us that from the design engineering to the seconds they take during pit stops, the whole thing is much more than just attaining top speeds. Even when it follows the usual arc of underdogs doing the unexpected, the script diverts attention to every aspect of what makes a successful F1 driver.
In terms of the story here, there are no major surprises from what one would anticipate from a movie like this. However, Joseph Kosinski knows that building a seemingly predictable track with believability and authenticity can take the experience to a different level. Co-produced by Lewis Hamilton, the film is shot in real locations with real F1 drivers and teams getting featured as rivals. While that really helps the movie to put the audience in the middle of the whole chaos, the writing sort of assigns a story to every character we see on screen. When you imagine an F1 team, the energy is largely masculine, and in this movie, they have female characters playing the parts of technical director and tire gunner. There is a nice moment in the film where the tire gunner requests Hayes not to show sympathy towards her publically.
The production quality of the film is top-notch, and the visuals that use these quick pans with cameras mounted on the racing cars really make the movie visually exhilarating. It was very much like watching a real race but with sound effects that sort of put you in the middle of the action. The tactics Hayes applies and the way the whole thing builds towards being a team work was so smooth. Hans Zimmer’s background score is really elevating those racing moments. The editing here has this way of ending episodes with prolonged cuts to black. The placement of one of those cuts was so effective that the projector operator in the theater from where I watched the movie thought that was the interval point. There is one superb dream-to-reality match cut at the beginning of the film.
The signature irreverent attitude of Brad Pitt is basically the nature of the central character, and hence, he performs those bits of Sonny Hayes with absolute ease. Occasionally, there are these moments of vulnerability, and the actor shifts the energy smoothly to accommodate that. Damson Idris plays the young teammate of Hayes, JP. He is the representative of the current generation who is more bothered about the PR, and the actor was fine in pulling off that character. Kerry Condon, as Kate, gets a fairly well-written character who is not there as a mere support. The romantic equation between Kate and Hayes is used effectively by the story to tap into the emotional spaces of those characters. Javier Bardem plays the part of that unnecessarily optimistic friend of the hero who gives far too many second chances. He was fun to watch, and there is a palpable friendship energy between him and Pitt, which actually helps the movie in some of the cliched moments.
From the psychological side to the extremely technical and tactical details, F1 takes you closer to this format, and it shows you why it is a sport that needs consistent effort. Even though, on a one-liner level, the story is pretty simple, the way they have designed the drama inside the races by incorporating Hayes’ experience and practical application of that experience makes F1 a thrilling watch. The soul and shell of F1 and Ford vs Ferrari are pretty similar. While F1 is so much fun to watch, I would say the Matt Damon-Christian Bale movie has that slight edge in terms of the emotional impact.
