Once known as “the greatest promise never fulfilled,” Sonny Hayes was Formula 1’s brightest talent in the 1990s—until a crash nearly ended his career. Thirty years later, he’s making a living as a mercenary driver when he’s approached by his former teammate Ruben Cervantes, now the owner of a struggling Formula 1 team on the brink of collapse. Ruben convinces Sonny to return to Formula 1 as the team’s last hope and his own shot at becoming the best driver in the world. Sonny will race alongside rookie Joshua Pearce, a determined young talent set on doing things his own way. But as the engines roar, the past resurfaces, and Sonny realizes that in Formula 1, your teammate is also your fiercest rival—and the road to redemption is not one you can travel alone.
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How many wings do the cars from Expensify APXGP lose? There’s barely a bump that doesn’t send one flying, as a side effect of the reckless antics of the resurrected Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), brought back into the team by Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) to avoid selling the company to the highest bidder. At this point, it’s worth noting that Sonny has to navigate both technical and emotional dynamics with Kate (Kerry Condon), the lead female engineer on the team, and with Expensify’s young driver, African-American Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), who has a protective mother, Bernadette (Sarah Niles), female character number two. Needless to say, F1 – The Movie comes with a mix of politically correct choices in terms of gender and ethnicity, though they don’t do much to alter the male-dominated structure of the competition, where generational and digital shifts are what really drive the story.
The key to everything lies in those wings, because the title itself—reduced to the bare acronym F1, paired with the clarifier The Movie (just to be sure we know it’s not a computer function key)—suggests, through its typeface, the curved lines of the rear parts of the ever-racing Formula 1 cars or the schematic image of straights and treacherous bends. Look at one of the posters: the protagonist bathed in sunset red, the car behind him—suddenly, the graphic and conceptual link between the rear wing and the title takes on tangible shape. If there’s a sequel, the real challenge will be figuring out where to place the number “2” without confusing it with F1.
In any case, that “F” in the Italian title reminds us that F1 refers to an essential “filmic” factor: yes, it is a film, and it’s less shallow than it seems on the surface. Everything is suggestive, starting with the company name “Expensify” (as for “APXGP,” it’s probably best not to dwell on it or try remembering it), clearly hinting at “expensive.” F1 – The Movie is a financially massive audiovisual product, which only allows itself to be subtle in its subtext. “Cervantes,” the surname of the auteur-turned-manager, nods to the writer of Don Quixote, as “quixotic” is precisely the desperate attempt to give one last chance to a veteran of a fading cinematic generation—like Brad Pitt himself, who already outlasted those from before the ’90s. Hence the sunset—also shown on the poster.
The increasingly rapid turnover of stars, directors, and key figures at every level of post-cinema makes Joseph Kosinski’s project—he’s also co-writer and producer—even more significant than similar ventures like Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick. F1 – The Movie has no direct prequel; instead, it draws from an entire cinematic tradition (with four wheels as a recurring dynamic emblem) sustained over decades. It also leans into the reality of fully digital cinema, where replacing a wing follows a logic of pixel-based regeneration—something Kosinski has made his own. His storytelling is so embedded in computer-generated imagery that he can name The Movie like a button you press: F1.
Anton Giulio Mancino
Cineforum, June 28, 2025
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Getting lost in Ehren Kruger’s predictable screenplay runs the risk of focusing only on the most obvious aspects of F1, Joseph Kosinski’s new film which, like Top Gun: Maverick and Tron: Legacy, blazes forward on the wings of speed, favoring motion over narrative. That might be a limitation, but it’s one that overflows with cinema at every burst of acceleration.
Kosinski’s films could do without dialogue and few would miss it; from his debut, when he revived the interplay between digital and tangible in Tron: Legacy, the Iowa-born director has shown a deep pull toward motion, characters in action, and the very roots of moving images. It doesn’t really matter if his protagonists say what they’re thinking—because they’ll show it, right there on screen, freezing viewers in their seats. Kosinski knows exactly what role he plays in the Hollywood machine and steps into it with solid dedication. This is clear once again in F1 – The Movie, his fifth feature film (in 2022, while Top Gun: Maverick ruled the skies and the box office, Netflix released his sci-fi-tinged thriller Spiderhead), which fires up the engines of Formula 1 in a way rarely seen on screen.
To make the Grand Prix sequences more believable and gripping, real locations were used for filming. The high-octane duels between flying chunks of metal aim to strike a balance between realism (so exaggerated it’s a miracle the crashes don’t leave dead drivers behind) and play—the kind of play that, by nature, is a challenge, one launched at yourself before it ever targets an opponent.
Kosinski uses car racing to reshape the current cultural imagination, just as he previously did with digital worlds, spaceships, and fire (always destructive, never redemptive), and fighter jets—settings where speed reigns and stillness equals death. You lose yourself on the racetrack, hurtling at insane speeds toward a future that could mean glory, or a crash, or perhaps glory in the crash. That’s why the screenplay feels almost irrelevant. As many have noted, Kruger’s story—far from the ambitions of his Arlington Road days—leans more into the gym where he trained by writing three Transformers films for Michael Bay, Ghost in the Shell for Rupert Sanders, and the aforementioned Top Gun: Maverick. The plot never really surprises or elevates expectations.
A redemption and coming-of-age tale, with Brad Pitt playing Sonny Hayes—a man rediscovering himself while helping Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) grow as a person and athlete—F1 – The Movie sticks to its straight line, steering clear of narrative hairpin turns, even as they erupt everywhere during the races. It’s fair to feel some disappointment here, but it’s worth stressing that F1 is a film to be experienced on the big screen, almost as if it were an abstract piece, where image becomes the only true substance.
You could toy with Kosinski’s “auteur” patterns, imagining this dive into racing—featuring real brands and actual Formula 1 drivers with no stand-ins—as yet another blurring of the virtual and the real (after all, Joshua trains for races via simulation, not through experience). It’s sci-fi-adjacent, like much of Kosinski’s work. He also has a keen eye for turning his actors into icons, and Pitt here feels almost like a subtler Tom Cruise—an object of the gaze, a figure mythologizing the scene even before it fully forms. In that sense, F1 becomes an epic poem about Pitt’s star persona, one that defies time—fifty-something drivers have raced in Formula 1, but not since the days of Louis Rosier in 1956. Pitt anchors the film both on the track and in the modern Hollywood spotlight.
He’s the one fixed point in a film driven entirely by speed—the only static presence in Kosinski’s surge of acceleration. A motionless body in the cockpit, as the world outside blurs out of focus. Maybe, just maybe, a deliberate reminder that even in a culture obsessed with speed, the human figure remains at the center.
Raffaele Meale
Quinlan, July 2, 2025
