Flasz On Film

To write a half-decent country song, you allegedly need only three chords and the truth. The same could be said for a great underdog sports movie—just swap the guitar for a gearbox, and the heartbreak for horsepower. 

The best ones on record, like Days of Thunder or Rocky, tend to follow a rather simple template in pursuit of crafting the most dramatically exhilarating spectacle the toolkit is able to afford. It’s not about the plot or the minute intricacies of the storytelling, let alone its novelty. It’s all about the combination of authenticity of the experience, stakes of the drama, scale of the spectacle… and, like that country song, the truth. The truth of the characters we are asked to cheer on as they take on the stakes, engage in the drama, elevate the spectacle and give the experience an authentic, beating heart. And the characters don’t need to be original, complex or deep to achieve that either. They just have to be believable and honest enough.  

Nobody ever accused Rocky Balboa of being a nuanced character, or the central conflict between Maverick and Iceman (yes—Top Gun also qualifies as a sports movie, if you ask me) of carrying dramatic weight worthy of critical acclaim. They were simple and relatable and only elevated by the innate charisma of the actors asked to inhabit them. They didn’t necessarily tell you anything new or enlightening. But they were earnest, truthful and completely in tune with the mission of elevating the experience of those who chose to buy the ticket and engage with the film. They were crucial to the exhilaration part of the spectacle. Without Rocky’s heart being placed on his sleeve, his bout against Apollo Creed wouldn’t have worked. Without Maverick and Iceman completely buying into the corniness of how their characters were written, the movie would have come across as laughably embarrassing instead of engrossing and awesome. 

This is what you can expect from F1. Apologies, F1®— The Movie. Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to his lauded Top Gun: Maverick is not here to deliver a complicated, plot-driven blockbuster full of wrinkles and character avenues hiding under the aegis of a monumental set piece-laden spectacle. It’s a simple racing movie that wants to succeed on the back of its adherence to these tried-and-true commandments of high-octane entertainment.  

Authenticity. Stakes. Scale. Truth. No more, no less. 

This studio-backed juggernaut with a price tag circling a third of one billion dollars is an exercise in pared down storytelling, dramatic simplicity and the kind of viewer immersion you rarely find in movies outside of such event tentpoles as Mad Max: Fury Road, Gravity, Inception or some of the more successful entries in the Mission: Impossible franchise. This is the kind of movie you don’t go to see for the story or plot, nor is it a film you will end up recommending to your friends based on the strength of the character work. It’s the kind of movie you leave the house to watch because it might be an experience you won’t be able to recreate at home… unless your dad is a Saudi sheik and you have your own personal IMAX screen. It’s the kind of movie you choose not to intellectualize because it’s impossible to describe what it must feel like to experience the rumbling vibration of a W16 engine of an idling Bugatti Chiron to someone who has never sat in one. 
 
This veritable festival of racing movie clichés you remember perfectly from the aforementioned Days of Thunder or movies like Speed Racer, Driven and Rush is a simple beast. Its narrative skeleton is built on a rivalry between an aging has-been (or as the movie calls him, a never-was) racing driver Sonny Hayes (played by Brad Pitt) and a young and cocky Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) and the struggles of their underdog Formula One team in the ridiculously competitive landscape of the most accomplished racing teams the world has ever seen. Their mission is not to win the world championship. That’s well outside of their scope. What their boss (Javier Bardem) wants them to do is to win anything before the end of the season and help the team survive. Their car is described as shit-box, tensions are running high and relationships fray as Sonny and Joshua sort out their place in the team social hierarchy while you, the viewer, get to sit in the cockpit with them and enjoy likely the most immersive racing experience ever projected in cinemas.  
 
Cutting straight to the chase and at the risk of repeating myself, F1 is not here to redefine the template of the racing movie but rather to capitalize on it in ways nobody was able to do before. In fact, just looking at the screenwriting credits of ?Ehren Kruger responsible for the script (a bunch of Transformers movies and the more recent Joseph Kosinski gigs) should inform you as to what to expect. This movie has a need for speed and the creative team clearly spared no expense in an effort to deliver on their promise while wanting you to forget that screenwriting is even a thing worth spending half a second thinking about. Because in Formula One, half a second accounts for more of a difference between being on top of the world and smashing into the barrier and bursting into flames at incomprehensibly high speeds. 
 
Granted, a good chunk of the hefty production budget must have gone to pay for the various licencing agreements the movie required to ensure adequate authenticity, but you can tell just how much care was put into the mission of making the viewer not only see the racing, but feel it in every bone in their body, too. Sure, you can accuse F1 of running like a never-ending slide show of postcard glitz you’d find in highly polished media coverage of Formula One racing, but the experience really fires on all cylinders and even when it is allowed to idle, it does so at a steady 5000 rpm. It’s a firework; a movie that does to races what Mission: Impossible movies did for high-stakes stunt work and what Top Gun movies (both, actually) did for aerial cinematography. With cameras stuck to actual race cars and the editing placing strong emphasis on authentic viewer immersion, what transpires in F1 over the course of its two-and-a-half hour running time is simply magical. The drama may be workaday, but the experience is simply unmatched.  
 
Somehow, Kosinski was able to build on his experience working on Top Gun: Maverick, where he skilfully crafted an immersive spectacle reliant on having actors in actual jets doing stuff you cannot easily recreate on the green screen, and made sure that all racing sequences–from the opening Daytona race all the way to the heart-stopping Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi–would have you enter the state of sensory dissonance, both bolted to the seat and ready to launch into the stratosphere fuelled by surplus adrenaline alone. The movie gets up close and personal, conveys the sheer fright of high-speed racing and with the combination of its cinematography and editing, both likely candidates to walk away with Oscars next year, delivers the kind of dramatic exhilaration you won’t find elsewhere this summer.  

In fact, forget all other big blockbusters this year. You might as well come back to watch this movie twelve times because the moment it disappears from cinemas and shows up in your digital library or your Blu-Ray collection, the magic might not be the same. It’ll still be a phenomenal sports movie rooted in the adherence to its trio of genre chords and the truth, but it might not be the same. You simply need to watch Sonny and Joshua as they jockey for the dramatic pole position on the largest possible screen, just like twelve years ago you simple had to go out and see Gravity in IMAX because doing so in any other way would just not cut the mustard. Sure, at home you got the simple-yet-potent drama of grief and rebirth, but you simply wouldn’t be able to dress in words how that movie transcended the screen in a cinematic format.  

F1 is a movie you simply must experience to believe its magical powers. With three chords and the truth it delivers thrills and chills you will have to wait another decade to experience.  

Because what Kosinski achieves here is cinematic alchemy — a paradoxical state of immersion that leaves you both bolted to your seat and ejected from it. It’s pure, high-octane dissonance: the kind that rattles your bones, scrambles your breath, and leaves a phantom roar echoing in your chest long after the credits roll.