Fast Cars, Quick Money
- Aug 10
- 22 min read
By Aliki Bitsakakis
Trust me, it doesn’t make me happy to roast movies. Although it is fun. However, 99% of the time, I walk into theatres wanting to see something that excites, inspires, and entertains me. And as an F1 fan, I desperately wanted to like this one.
Oh well, you can’t always get what you want, so let’s roast this movie and pray they never make another one.
We’re talking about F1: The Movie today. Yes, that’s what it’s called. I, too, was surprised that such an obvious show of indifference in title creation was able to go unnoticed on such a large scale. Imagine if Happy Gilmore was actually Golf: The Movie.
Enough preamble. We’re going to take this review from three perspectives: that of an F1 fan, a filmmaker, and a woman.
As an F1 Fan
F1 races were on in my household every Sunday morning, but it’s only been in the past couple years that I’ve really become a fan. My entry point was not Drive to Survive, even though that helped increase the obsession, despite its overexaggerations. I watched a GQ video of Daniel Ricciardo reviewing scenes from racing movies. It was through this video that I realized these guys aren’t just driving around in circles; there is so much technical knowledge involved in this sport. It was a slippery slope from there as I acquired more and more random facts, I got to know all the drivers and team principals, and I watched races as if I would be tested on them.
The wonderful thing about F1 is, no matter your entry point, the sport welcomes you warmly. The broadcast does such a great job of teaching you as you watch; analysts go over the track, they talk about tires and how rain will impact the race and which drivers are best equipped to win. Even as the race is going on, they’re explaining pit strategies and fastest laps and every term you will need to know for future races. Before you know it, you’re an expert.
So, I was nervous to watch this movie, because I am so interested in this sport, I know a lot about this sport, and I really love it. Hollywood sniffs out the fanatics like bloodhounds right before they serve the fatal shot.
My gut feeling was correct: that this movie was not made for F1 fans. To that, studios may say, we had to make this accessible to everyone! And my refute would be, F1 is accessible to everyone, stop treating your audience like idiots. As I just said, anyone can follow F1 with a little interest and a little effort. The sport itself recognizes that this is a complex sport and new viewers, who join all the time, will benefit from a little exposition. Also, you can make a movie accurate and fun; those things do not contest one another. Yes, there is a lot of technical knowledge and keywords to know in order to fully understand a race. But has the lack of an physics degree prevented any of us from enjoying a Christopher Nolan film? No. Because subjects do not need to be dumbed down to be felt by audiences.
First problem: Brad Pitt. This may actually be the biggest problem. Pitt played Sonny Hayes, who briefly raced in F1 before a devastating crash ended his career. (Full sidenote: It’s mentioned multiple times that Sonny raced against Ayrton Senna, who was tragically killed in a race crash. Having Sonny’s story mirror Senna’s, yet having Sonny live and never mentioning in the film that Senna did not, didn’t sit well with me. I don’t think they had to draw this comparison, or even mention Senna’s story, so I don’t have a full argument here. But it just felt weird to me and I wanted to point that out.) Fresh off a Daytona win in his old age, Sonny is recruited by an old racing rival, Ruben Cervantes (played by Javier Bardem), owner of the Formula 1 team APX GP. Ruben is at risk of losing his team, and to convince the board not to sell it and kick him out of the garage, Ruben has to win just one race this season. Spoiler alert: they win, he keeps the team. That’s right: this movie plays out exactly how you think it will. No surprises. No twists. No real reason to watch. Anyway, Sonny agrees to join APX as their second driver, and it’s off to the races.
I have a couple of issues with Pitt. Although Sonny’s age is never mentioned in the film, Pitt is 61 years old, 60 at the time of filming. I hate to be ageist here but actually, this movie is ageist, because Pitt’s love interest was 20 years younger than him. Currently, the oldest driver on the grid is Fernando Alonso at 44 years old. The oldest F1 driver in history was Louis Chiron, who raced at 55 years old in the 1950s. With the technological advancements that have been made over the past 70 years, I doubt someone in their fifties will be able to drive an F1 car. Only time will tell, when Alonso sticks it out. This is all just to illustrate, Brad Pitt is a little old for this sport. Even if it’s possible, it’s just never happened before. Sonny Hayes is the oldest driver in history, and it’s never explicitly mentioned? And we’re supposed to believe that it took him a couple of pushups and a soft neck training sequence to prepare him for this? Sure, there is hesitation around the hiring of Sonny. But that’s mainly because he hasn’t raced in so long, and he crashed the car pretty much immediately (after posting a good lap time, which was enough for them to still hire him?).
This movie would have benefitted from lampshading, which is a literary technique where the writer will purposely point out a flaw in their story rather than hoping you don’t notice. By acknowledging the problem, the writer signals to the audience that they know there’s an issue, and there’s a reason they chose to write it anyway. Example: Brad Pitt is 60 years old. Rather than hoping we don’t notice, they could have specifically said, Sonny Hayes is about to become the oldest F1 driver in history, and that’s why everyone is so hesitant about him. And then, we need a stronger reason for letting him drive anyway. His F1 career was cut very short when he was young. Maybe build him up as a one-time world champion, maybe he comes from a family of drivers, maybe there’s something specific and unique about him that sets him up for old-age-success. Instead, the film told us, he’s Sonny Hayes, we should trust him. Even though he crashes the car the first time he drives the car.
Secondly, Pitt does not look like an F1 driver. You can spot an F1 driver from a kilometre away because you can spot their neck from a kilometre away. They also spend much of their time in the simulator, which we briefly see when Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) is training. Sonny, on the other hand, jogs around the track, never sets foot in the simulator, and is ready to go? He also does one cold plunge, during which he somehow held an entire conversation. I never believed that Sonny was physically ready to take on this challenge. I can suspend a certain amount of disbelief. But given that the filmmakers of this movie went out of their way to portray real racing, with real drivers and teams, I felt they were trying to make this film as accurate as possible. And nothing about Sonny screamed accurate portrayal of an F1 driver.
Let’s just accept that Sonny Hayes is physically capable of driving this car. And let’s ignore the fact that he is the only American driver, that this is much more a European and global sport than it is an American sport, and let’s pretend like this whole thing wasn’t a metaphor for the American propaganda that is the U.S. hijacking every single thing in the world that is half popular and buying three whole races when no other country in the world has three races. Okay, fine. There have been American drivers before, even if there isn’t one now. So, I’ll let this one slide.
Even if we accept that he is physically capable, the driving we see on screen tells a different story. Did no one on this writing team ever watch an F1 race? If you purposely crash into someone, you don’t get away with it. These cars are going 300km/hour. Anything that puts drivers in danger is flagged immediately. Drivers get penalties all the time for going too fast in the pit lane, for pushing each other off the track, for not reducing their speed to the correct amount under yellow flags. At the very least, you will receive a time/grid penalty. At the very most, causing collisions can get you banned from the sport. Watch the newest season of Drive to Survive (since I’ve lost hope that these producers will ever watch a race) and you’ll see the story of Flavio Briatore, who was banned from F1 because he convinced one of his drivers to cause a collision to give the other driver an advantage. Also, Sonny caused crashes or just crashed himself in pretty much every single race, so it was hard to believe he would be kept on this team at all.
Not only did Sonny cause collisions with ulterior motives, but he was constantly fighting with his team, making it really hard for me to root for him. I get it, he’s the bad boy with the tattoos and the floppy blond hair. You know what usually makes us like that character? Charm. Skill. Emotional depth. None of which we got from Pitt’s stale performance. Sonny told Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) how to build the car, as if she had no idea (we’ll get more into gender stereotypes later), and his solution – building the car for ‘combat’ – is the literal strategy of back of the grid teams in F1, so it wasn’t revolutionary. Sonny was also arrogant enough to refuse to come in for pit stops, and to then not exit the pit because the team put different tires on than what he wanted. He just stayed there. For a long time. Until they put on the tires he wanted. I don’t know what the producers of this film think the role of the drivers is, but they are not in charge. They are very important, and they do have a say, and we hear arguments between drivers and their strategists over the radio all the time. But this was so extreme, I could not suspend my belief here and accept that he would be kept on this team, that anyone would like him or stomach working with him, and that he had any chance of winning with this attitude. Sonny also gave orders to Pearce’s strategy team, which was so silly. Each driver has their own team, and the drivers are supposed to work together. Of course, they are also competitors, which is another thing that makes this sport so interesting. But in no situation would Sonny be ordering Pearce’s strategists around. Sonny was one of, if not the, most unlikeable characters I have seen in a long time.
Another thing I felt missing from this movie was world-building. Some people confuse world-building with a fantasy technique – when you’re inventing a fictional world, you need to draw maps and have lots of exposition so your audience understands where they are. Some people don’t realize that you need world-building for every story. Even though F1 exists in the real world, Apple wanted to make this story accessible to everyone, right? So why did I walk away feeling we got no sense of how race weekends work, how rich these drivers are, how one actually gets to the level of Formula 1, the thousands of people working in the factories to build these cars, the family members and significant others at every race, basically the shear scale of this sport? And all of that is very interesting, this film would have benefitted from world-building and some interest in the world at that.
Other things that were wrong with the F1 aspects:
Sonny Hayes showed up to Abu Dhabi right before the race and actually raced – this cannot happen, driver lineup cannot be changed after qualifying on Saturday.
APX GP (pretty funny that the team is named after the apex of a corner) was said to be the 11th team on the grid, yet Pearce declared, “there are only 20 seats!” There would be 22 seats, like next year when they add the Cadillac team.
It doesn’t make any sense that APX needs to win a race in order for Javier Bardem to be kept on; midfield and back of the grid teams are not vying with Red Bull and McLaren and Mercedes to win; they’re fighting against the other midfield teams and their goal is to score points and to place ahead of the others in order to get as much money at the end of the season as possible. So, it would’ve made sense if their goal was to just beat Alpine for example. But, battles between Haas and Sauber aren’t as exciting as Verstappen vs Norris, right? So this had to be as dramatic as possible, not realistic? Even though you could’ve written a story that was both?
Joshua’s manager telling him to keep his seat he needs to play the social media and sponsorship game – not true, it’s only about performance and things like social status just help with brand deals and money.
Pearce would not be out partying the night before (I have no way of confirming this, I don’t personally know any drivers, but I feel this is a safe assumption knowing these guys are high performance athletes, their weight is logged before and after the race, and race winners are seen partying after races) and it was pretty absurd having him make the decision to have an early night, while his literal manager was encouraging he stay out? As if winning a race the next day is not important?
Pearce’s crash was apparently modelled after Romain Grosjean’s horrific crash, which, you know, knocked him out of the sport. So, how did Pearce return?
And, there’s the great publicity stunt of shooting this film at real races. I will admit, the first time we saw real people on screen, I got excited. Because Pitt was giving the worst performance of his life, seeing Guenther Steiner gave me a sliver of comfort. Past that initial reaction, I hated it. I understand why they did this: because this is the only thing people are talking about. Shooting live at races essentially started the marketing campaign for this movie while it was still being shot, which has now become a trend, with the production of The Devel Wears Prada 2 being captured by paparazzi around New York, essentially ruining any surprise that would come of watching the movie. Do studios not want us to watch movies anymore? Anyway, that’s where the magic ended for me, and interest in one’s marketing strategy will not encourage me to write a positive review. Having real drivers on screen became distracting very quickly, I literally felt my blindspots darken as I tried to spot as many people as I could in the establishing shots. It also brought into question when this story took place. This movie was shot across the 2023 and 2024 F1 seasons. The drivers of those seasons were all on screen. Are they characters? I feel this story would have benefited from some real rivalries between teams, with other drivers interacting with Sonny, something to build a world around them so it didn’t feel they were arguing in a vacuum, or racing against hypothetical enemies. Also, Brad Pitt and Damson Idris were not literally driving in the races, if that was up for debate. They were driving F2 cars, which are not as fast as F1 cars and would not have been able to race on the same track as those real F1 racers. So I’m assuming they digitally imposed F1 cars around them. I just want to make that clear because I’m tired of the Apple propaganda implying that Brad Pitt literally drove an F1 car against real drivers. The racing shots were cool, but they were also post-production magic.
Aside from the distraction of shooting live, which was emphasized by the poor acting jobs from the real drivers (which were poor because none of these guys are actors), it really dates this movie. Drivers and even team brandings change all the time. I saw drivers and logos that are not around anymore, like Magnussen and AlphaTauri. Which made it more distracting because then I got to thinking, does this story literally take place in the 2023 or 2024 season? It sure looks like that. Okay, so in that case, all those races have results. And APX GP and Hayes are not on those results. So does this not take place during those seasons? If the answer is yes, then which season is it, because I’m seeing things from both? If it doesn’t take place in those real seasons, why do they refer to all the other drivers and teams by name? Make a decision.
In F1: The Movie, a thick line remains between reality and fiction. In The Studio, one of this year’s buzziest shows from Apple TV, fiction is integrated with reality. Martin Scorsese is not just spoken about in The Studio; he is an actual character, with lines and purpose. In F1, no real driver or even team has any impact on the story being told. We don’t get more than a slo-mo shot of a driver, so they become these mute background characters who, even though they are literally winning races and putting Sonny in his place, have no impact on the drama unfolding. It’s like no one ever realizes why APX is such a bad team – it’s because the other teams, that we never see, are better. While The Studio acknowledges how silly it is that this fake studio is making movies presumably in the real world, leaning into the satire of it all, F1 takes itself very seriously, does not acknowledge the real world (and the real races from 2023/2024), yet does not fully dive into the fictional either. It hovers in between, resulting in an uncanny, silly, almost uncomfortable watch.
As a Filmmaker
Music:
The only part of this film I liked was the score and the soundtrack. We all know Hans Zimmer is a genius, but I feel we got a really different side of him here, the way he blended an orchestra with an electronic DJ set. His score reminded me of Challengers, in the sense that he figured out what this sport feels like, in terms of music. This is the kind of score that I can envision enveloped in F1 marketing; it’s the kind of score probably playing in the ears of drivers (metaphorically) as they drive. It captures the energy and the drama of this sport and it is by far, the best element of this film.
And the soundtrack, which you can listen to on Spotify instead of seeing the movie, is pretty good too! A big pet peeve of mine is when a movie releases an album, or puts up an original song for an Oscar nomination, and the music is nowhere to be found in the actual movie, it just plays over the end credits. I find it much more impressive when a song serves a purpose in a movie, and many songs get my praises in F1. I didn’t notice everything, and some songs were more featured than others, but all in all I was impressed. My favourite was the Chris Stapleton song that got a prominent feature near the beginning of the film, and my least favourite was Raye’s, because I love Raye, and her song was just playing faintly in the distance during a conversation. Shame.
Visuals:
Director Joseph Kosinski, who also directed Top Gun: Maverick, has spoken about how they managed to shoot on the cars. According to his description, Brad Pitt and Damson Idris drove F2 cars on F1 circuits, and they mounted cameras onto the cars. However, the type of camera gear you’re probably imagining would be way to heavy to sit on the car, so they worked with Sony to develop cameras small enough, yet good enough quality, to get the job done. They were also able to operate the cameras live, so Kosinski was shouting camera movements as the driving sequences were going on.
It’s really impressive! It’s the kind of thing that I wish I were there to see and appreciate the technology and ingenuity that went into developing this system. And I know I already roasted Pitt for driving an F2, not an F1 car, but I will walk that back a little bit and say I would never be able to do that, so hats off to them.
Top Gun: Maverick is constantly mentioned in promoting this film, because Kosinski was probably hired based off that film alone. The flying sequences in Maverick were amazing. Being in the jets as they shoot up and flip and twist and dive down – I think we can all agree it was exhilarating. So, I was expecting the same thrill from F1. But there is one major thing that I think everyone has overlooked: we have F1 races! None of this is new to us! Yes, the driving sequences were cool. But I have seen driving sequences before. Every car in every actual race has a camera on it. As I’ve said before, F1 has the greatest broadcast across all sports. We get a very clear view of the drivers’ perspectives, we get the team radios, we see the garages and the pit wall. We know what this sport looks like. Jets, on the other hand, we don’t know much about, unless you’re actually a pilot. You don’t need to be an F1 driver to have a visual entry point to F1 driving.
I felt the racing sequences did not offer anything new to F1 fans who are so well-acquainted with this sport. However, I still find it impressive because F1 is literally cool; they picked a cool subject matter for this film. If you’re the kind of person who obsesses over the visuals of a film, and doesn’t care too much for story or acting or anything else, I would recommend seeing this in theatres.
Acting:
Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt, oh, Brad Pitt. What the hell was that? I have never been so disappointed by this man onscreen. This performance was so mailed-in. At no point during this film did I see Sonny Hayes – I saw Brad Pitt, showing us how far good looks and laziness can get you. Damson Idris on the other hand, should have led this film. He was pretty good, just didn’t have the script to back up the performance.
As a Woman
There were exactly three women on screen (I’m not counting all the half-dressed women in the club): one technical director, one pit stop team member, one mother. Oh, and that woman who was running the simulator but she didn’t have much impact so there’s my assessment of that.
Kerry Condon plays technical director Kate McKenna. Unfortunately for Kate, despite being in the position she is, despite being praised as a genius, she needs Brad Pitt to catapult her into success. What this plot line shows us is that women are incapable of excelling in a field such as F1 without the assistance of a man. Oh, and this movie shows us that no one can resist Brad Pitt. Kate was built as the stereotype of a modern woman: she doesn’t need a man! She hates Sonny and her ex-husband left her when she decided to pursue F1, which was actually an interesting backstory because it gives us a little insight to the lives of everyone who works in this sport that’s essentially a travelling circus. Sacrifices must be made all the time in F1, and I wanted to hear more from Kate on that matter. But we got nothing.
Tell me, Apple, why you would build a (stereotypical) female character who doesn’t need a man, and then throw a man at her? Is this a Hallmark movie? Firstly, a strong female character does not have to be asexual. Women can have careers and marriages. I know that’s an insane thought, but trust me, both can happen. Secondly, does she need a man or not? She’s set up to not need a man. But then she not only needs Pitt romantically, she also needs him to tell her how to build the car! So, which is it?
Those two little scenes undermined Kate’s entire character. Two scenes that could have been cut to preserve the strong female stereotype that honestly, we’ll let slide for a Hollywood film. Once they sleep together, Kate’s demeanor totally changes. She becomes timid and submissive while Sonny is stoic, tormented, too cool to pay her much attention. I felt sick to my stomach watching this grown woman written by men. The worst part is when Ruben shows up, Kate opens the door, he cheekily asks to see Sonny, she berates him for assuming she and Sonny would sleep together because she’s the technical director for crying out how, how unprofessional would that be? And then she says he’s on the balcony, and lets Ruben in. I cannot emphasize enough: this is the worst scene I have seen in a very, very long time. Not only does the technical director sleep with a driver!!!!! but the owner of the team laughs it off? Like this isn’t an HR nightmare? What do these people think is going on in F1? And would it have killed them to cast someone not 20 years younger than him? Probably. Because that would mean having a 60-year-old female love interest. The horror!
The second woman is pit stop team member Jodie (Callie Cook), who was visually singled out from the beginning because, uh, she was a woman. It’s like sticking one character in a bright yellow shirt so we know they’re the first one to die in a horror film, because we visually peg them as different. In this case, the visual marker was a woman, that was it. But we all saw her, it worked. So we knew that there was a reason we were forced to notice her. The reason: she caused an accident! She messed up! The one woman! Left the tire gun for the car to drive over! And then Pitt defended her and she was like uh, I don’t need you to defend me, Brad Pitt. And he was like, oh, sorry blonde girl. And then we saw her onscreen a handful of times, every time with the feeling that now her story is about…not messing up? Being a regular pit crew member? Hiding her womanhood because what else could have caused such a hiccup? But she doesn’t need a man, no, no. Only Kate needs a man, after telling us she does not need a man, and she somehow keeps her job.
The third woman is Joshua’s mother, Bernadette, who hates Sonny for endangering her son. I didn’t mind this character, even though we see the overprotective ethnic mother so often. I minded that Sarah Niles, who plays Bernadette, is 38 years old, and that her son, Joshua Pearce, was played by Damson Idris, who is 33 years old. That, I mind. Big time.
I didn’t go into this movie thinking it would require a feminist reading. But I couldn’t stand by and say nothing about this. Because we’re talking about F1. Over 40% of the F1 fanbase is female. Why is that? Is it because the drivers are cute? Funny, I know. But don’t roll your eyes, multiple men have actually said that to me when I reveal I’m an F1 fan. Here’s a tip, girls. When a man says something like that to you, say, I never said they were cute, you just said they were cute. Who do you think is the cutest?
40% of fans are female because this sport welcomes women. I watch hockey, basketball, I put on the Super Bowl and important soccer matches. Sports where the athletes are men, and, most coaches and even announcers are also male. I don’t see nearly as many women onscreen for those sports as I do when I’m watching F1 (save for the cheerleaders). We have female reporters, female engineers, we have had female team principals and we have had women race alongside the men. Now, we also have F1 Academy, the league/training program led by the ever-inspiring Susie Wolff, working towards developing young female drivers to reach the level of F1. And that is going to happen, you watch. Wolff has raced in F1 before, and the point of this program is not to force diversity in any way; the intent is to build drivers that can compete. And when people are given equal opportunities, the landscape will be diverse. And they’re well on their way in that mission, now with their own Netflix show as well that demonstrates that motor racing, more than any other male-dominated sport, welcomes women.
I see myself in this sport, yet I saw no traces of myself in this movie.
We’re not asking for any ‘woke’ representation here. You don’t need to make this about a female driver (you could, but that’s not necessary in my argument here), you don’t need to omit all love interest characters or anything like that. All I’m asking is to portray a woman accurately. No one is just their biological sex, that’s not how humanity works. Men are allowed to be racing drivers, they’re allowed to be moviestars and cowboys and astronauts and anything else they can dream of. Women can be those things. But first and foremost, the media is constantly reminding us that we are women, and with that comes certain expectations and limitations. A woman could not just be represented as an engineer in this movie; she had to be the object of sexual desire. A woman could not just work on the pit crew in this movie; she had to be the only person to make a mistake. A woman could not work on a driver’s team; she had to be a mother, because that is how we see women and when they reject such conventions, the media simply does not know what to do. We are constantly being singled out, we have to work twice as hard to reach the bare minimum, we are given fewer chances than men, and we are constantly demanding simple, basic treatment.
We don’t get anything. And watching this movie made me feel pessimistic about my space in this world, even though, in reality, F1 has always made me optimistic. I had to remind myself of reality as I walked out of the theatre. And I instantly felt comforted, thinking about all the women in the garages and on the grid.
Movies usually provide me comfort from this difficult world. In this case, reality swooped in to save my optimism.
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