“It’s just cars racing.”
That’s the phrase — or things equally as dismissive — I saw in far too many comment sections on Instagram, Twitter and otherwise in the wake of the teaser for the 2025 film F1, directed by Joseph Kosinski and starring Brad Pitt.
It won’t be. I promise.
Kosinski helmed Top Gun: Maverick a couple of years ago, widely acclaimed as one of the greatest sequels ever made. He notably also directed Only the Brave back in 2017; another legacyquel in Tron: Legacy in 2011 as his debut feature; and Oblivion, his first collaboration with Tom Cruise.
Pitt, of course, has an Academy Award to his name thanks to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and really needs no introduction, thanks to an acting repertoire that ranges from Inglourious Basterds to Se7en to Ocean’s Eleven (not to mention underrated gems like Ad Astra or Fury).
We don’t have much to go on, to be fair. We have one teaser trailer that clocks in at under two minutes and only gives us a minimal taste of what this movie will be like. I’d wager the runtime will be somewhere in the neighborhood of two hours and 20 minutes (book it, Danno). We know that it follows an older, retired Formula 1 driver (Pitt) who returns to train and be a teammate to a rising star (Damson Idris) on the fictional APX GP team.
But it is pretty frustrating to see some of the uninitiated (I sound insanely pretentious here, but no way around it) to the racing world seemingly writing this off, simply because it’s about racing and cars going fast around a track. Nothing in motorsports is ever that simple; yes, a lot of racing films fail to get beyond that, but it’s important to take who’s working on this thing into consideration.
What’s great is that we can clearly discern quite a few tracks as the teaser flits through settings. Monza. Silverstone. Spa. We know there’s a lot of filming left to go, that Lewis Hamilton is a producer and that Jerry Bruckheimer, who gave us films like Maverick and Days of Thunder, is also producing.
That leads me to another comparison: Tony Scott, the director of the original Top Gun, as well as Days of Thunder (essentially dubbed Top Gun on wheels), True Romance, Crimson Tide and more. Many have compared Kosinski going from Maverick to F1 as a similar trajectory.
It’s also been implied that, just because it’s cars racing, a similar move to Scott or anything similar, maybe this won’t have the same emotional weight that something like Maverick did.
Kosinski can do emotion, too. The last 15-ish minutes of Only the Brave, which chronicles the efforts of the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighters against the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, absolutely annihilate any viewer’s emotions. I’ve seen it once, maybe twice, and I’m an absolute wreck. It’s one of those movies that’s great, yet hard to recommend because of how heart-wrenching it is.
More recently, the entire final 30-45 minutes of Maverick are an emotional rollercoaster, but the final moments — the embrace between Cruise and Miles Teller’s characters, the fist pump from Charles Parnell, Teller and Glen Powell’s characters making up — had me damn near tearing up in the theater (all five times I saw it on the big screen).
Plus, Pitt isn’t new to sports fodder: Moneyball is one of the most recent great sports movies, which is right up there with the best baseball films.
Other similar bits to Maverick include the actual method of filmmaking. True, for that one they had tons of fighter jets going airborne with cameras in the cockpits to get those insane shots, and that’s much different than cars on terra firma. This film did do a similar thing, installing tiny, high-definition cameras in the cockpits of F1 cars.
But the goal and concept are very much the same. Kosinski, Bruckheimer and company are dedicated to making sure the audience is completely immersed in the environment. I’ve now seen Maverick seven or eight times, and it never gets old. It’s a perfect film. This crew knows what it’s doing.
My one criticism aligned with others I’ve seen, in that the color palette could use some work. Hopefully that’s a rest-of-production and post-production alteration, since quite a few of the shots do lack saturation and a certain vibrancy.
Music-wise, no complaints. Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” is a big part of Only the Brave. The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is in both the trailer and feature for Maverick (and Roger Daltrey’s scream was ear-shattering in the IMAX version of the trailer). This goes with Queen’s “We Will Rock You”. Low-hanging fruit? Sure. Still insanely awesome? Yep.
It remains to be seen if this movie continues to prove it easy to tumble into the same pitfalls and cliches other racing movies have, but I have faith. The cast is a big portion of that, especially Pitt, who continues to prove he still has it.
Idris is part of a very good cast alongside Pitt. His primary claim to fame is the well-received FX show Snowfall; Kerry Condon is also part of the cast, having Marvel credits to her name along with The Banshees of Inisherin, which landed her an Oscar nomination.
Javier Bardem, who has an Oscar of his own thanks to playing serial killer Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, will be in F1 as well. Bardem was also in Skyfall, so Tobias Menzies (Casino Royale) being in this film too means there’s two 007 alums on the screen. Hamilton, presumably playing himself, rounds out the main cast.
And it wouldn’t be an F1 film without former team principal Guenther Steiner, who has the funniest possible shot in the trailer:
I’ve rewatched the whole teaser a couple of times, and every single time it gets to those long shots near the end of Pitt and Idris in the cars, I get the biggest, dumbest smile on my face.
I truly can’t wait. Apple, give me an IMAX experience I won’t forget — ear-shattering engine sounds, immersive visuals, a couple of great lead performances, intense racing action and an authentic look at F1 — and I might see this one six times in theaters.
About the author
Adam Cheek joined Frontstretch as a contributing writer in January 2019. A 2020 graduate of VCU, he covered sports there and later spent a year and a half as a sports host on 910 the Fan in Richmond, VA. He's freelanced for Richmond Magazine and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and also hosts the "Adam Cheek's Sports Week" podcast. Adam has followed racing since the age of three, inheriting the passion from his grandfather, who raced in amateur events up and down the East Coast in the 1950s.
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So far I’m not impressed, it really does look like Maverick on wheels, and I didn’t care for Maverick (to me there was nothing new or original about it, it was just a flashier remake of Top Gun).
Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, how unoriginal can they get. While a great song it’s been played to death in movies. It’s already been featured in at least 10 or 12 movies as far back as Mighty Ducks, and maybe before. Millions of songs have come out since We Will Rock You was released, but that’s all they could come up with?
Hopefully the sped up shots of the cars were just for the promo, but I doubt it. Watching the clip I expect this film will be full of all the same junk that other bad racing movies like Days of Blunder, Ford V Ferrari, Driven, etc always employ. Speeding the on track shots up to unrealistic levels, the hero having a problem and then miraculously charging through the field at twice the speed of every other car, and of course at least one huge overblown wreck featuring cars flying through the air, bouncing and tumbling across the screen.
I was really looking forward to “F1”. I had high hopes that it would be worthy successor to “Grand Prix” and “Rush”, but now I’m afraid it will just be another silly overwrought racing film. Let’s hope I’m wrong.
Thanks, Adam! I’m looking forward to this film, and if you’re excited about it, it’s surely going to be worth the wait!