Let’s be honest for a moment: I don’t follow Formula 1, and if you’d asked me to pick Daniel Ricciardo out of a lineup before Joseph Kosinski’s F1 went roaring across the IMAX, I’d have shrugged and asked for directions to pit lane. But I do go for any motorsport race I can, and I’m not immune to the thrall—the primal narcotic—of the engine’s scream and the crowd’s feverish pulse. The surprise here, sitting in a cavernous, digital theater, is that Kosinski’s film makes you almost forget about the physical sensation of the track. “Almost” is the key. The sound and the snarl are so close, so constantly engineered, you can sense the popcorn rattle, but never quite smell the gasoline.
Kosinski, working from a screenplay by Ehren Kruger (and joined at the producing hip, once again, by Jerry Bruckheimer), is less interested in recreating the mud and grime of the paddock than he is in giving us the ageless, full-throttle myth: the return of the old king for one last charge. In many ways, this is Top Gun without the airplanes or the government’s psychological war games, and the movie is all the better for jettisoning the ponderous patriotism and letting the sport’s white-knuckle competitiveness breathe. F1 isn’t really about the accuracy of tire allocations or the geopolitical fantasies that swirl around the real F1 circuit—no, it’s about the vibration in your seat, the stinging rush of adrenaline, the pure mythic drive to be “untouchable,” even if it’s only for a lap.
If you’re an F1 purist, you might stamp your feet in the aisles about minor “inaccuracies.” For the rest of us, Kosinski is a showman—the Master of Ceremonies in the grand carnival tent, who knows that what’s essential isn’t the car, but the gasp. He gives us a world of ruthless, vaporous speed, played not as somber melodrama but as the hottest and sharpest summer blockbuster. If you miss the grievous throb of a real-life race, that’s not the movie’s fault: nothing short of a V12 in your kitchen will suffice.
Brad Pitt, veined with charisma and sandpapered by thirty years of disappointment, barrels into this arena as Sonny Hayes. Pitt’s performance here is less about bombast than beard-stubbled survival. There’s the familiar Pittian twinkle, the half-grin that’s weathered too many seasons—yet Kosinski gives him new ground to play on: he’s not the invincible ace, but a man wading through the ghosts of his own mythology. Damson Idris, as the hot-headed British rival Joshua Pearce, is electrifying. If Pitt is the wounded god, Idris is his firebrand usurper—he vibrates with the insecurity and bristling talent of every kid who’s ever been told greatness is inevitable.
The supporting cast is color-splashed and vibrant: Javier Bardem’s Rubén, a desperate team principal, and Kerry Condon’s Kate, the stiletto-brain behind the tech desk, never fall into deadweight cliché. Kosinski, following the Top Gun Maverick playbook by way of Grand Prix (with a dash of Rush), sharpens every interaction to a competitive blade—there are no stray speeches or dead scenes. Everyone is chasing immortality, and everyone knows it’s fleeting.
Visually, this is as close to “pure cinema” as you’ll get at a multiplex in 2025. Claudio Miranda’s cinematography is exhilarating, in the technical, almost phantasmagoric sense. Every POV shot, wide sweep, split screen, or lens flare is deployed with the intent to dazzle. Much like the dizzying opening reels of Ford v Ferrari, there’s a sensation that your seat is tilting with the cars. It’s overwhelming without ever pratfalling into chaos.
As for the plot, it’s the old story—a battered underdog, a team on the verge, a brash rookie who needs a lesson in humility. There are classic reversals, betrayals, a backroom poker game for hearts and souls. Is it familiar? Oh, certainly. But Kosinski pulls it off with such violence of feeling, such emotional lucidity, that you hardly care. You know you’re watching an “old dog vs. new dog” showdown, but the movie manages to sidestep the bathos and false uplift that sink so many sports epics.
Hans Zimmer’s score, predictably, pounds at you with all the subtlety of a meteorite—but then, subtlety is for slower films. F1 knows its job is to overwhelm, and every screech, crash, and whiplash cut is another heaping spoon of spectacle. See it on the largest screen you can—it’s almost hilariously unsuited for anything else.
Does it make you care about real racing? That’s the miracle. Kosinski and his team have crafted what is, in all senses, a love letter to the artifice and agony of motorsport. You don’t need encyclopedic knowledge of constructors or care about Verstappen’s real-life title count; you need only surrender for 155 minutes to the rollercoaster, and you may, like me, leave hungry to see the real thing.
That’s the test of a great Hollywood sports spectacle: not whether it wins favor with the anoraks, but whether it wins your pulse. F1 isn’t truth; it is, in its best moments, pulp myth set alight—an extravagant vision of what we crave from the racetrack and from movies at their most primal. If it gets you clutching your seat and roaring at the finish, it has done more than enough. I can’t praise this enough: F1 is crackerjack cinema, all prizes, and more than worthy of a standing ovation on the podium.
