[COLUMN] F1 Puts the Man in the Machine | by Darren Mooney

Note: This post contains spoilers for F1: The Movie, and also for Oblivion. If you haven’t seen either, they’re solid. F1 is in theatres this weekend, and is worth seeing on as big a screen as possible with as good a sound system as possible. It doesn’t have a lot of surprises, and does largely what one expects a racing movie to do, but it’s a good time. That said, if you are not concerned about spoilers then start your engines.

There is a moment late in F1: The Movie in which Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) pulls his damaged racecar into the pit. “Alright!” his pitmaster Dodge (Abdul Salis) declares to the assembled team. “We have ten minutes to build a car!” The team proceeds to dismantle and reconstruct the top-of-the-line motor car within that time limit. Sonny never leaves the driver’s seat. He sits in the middle of the machine, as it is taken apart and put back together around him.

Most of the discussion around F1 is inevitably going to compare the film to Top Gun: Maverick. It is another movie about an ageing movie star in a fast vehicle, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Joseph Kosinski. The trailers proudly declare, “from Joseph Kosinski, director of Top Gun: Maverick.” While Maverick is a direct sequel to Top Gun, F1 feels more like a spiritual sequel to another collaboration between Tony Scott and Tom Cruise, Days of Thunder.

While there are “obvious similarities” between Days of Thunder and F1, Kosinski’s latest movie feels liberated by virtue of not having to directly connect to some older property. F1 is more free to be itself than Maverick was, in part because Brad Pitt is a fundamentally different sort of movie star than Tom Cruise, one who brings a different sort of energy. This, in turn, frees up F1 to feel like it is more of a Joseph Kosinski movie, a movie about men trapped in machines.

This is a recurring preoccupation for Kosinski as a storyteller. After all, Kosinski studied mechanical engineering at Stanford University and earned an architecture degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. It makes sense that one of the director’s recurring visual and thematic preoccupations as a filmmaker should be the question of where human beings exist within these engineered and designed worlds.

Kosinski’s first feature was TRON: Legacy, a gender-flipped Disney princess story in which Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) ventures into the digital world designed by his father Kevin (Jeff Bridges) and confronts the digital programme CLU (also Bridges) coded by his father. In Oblivion, Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is an astronaut who discovers that his entire life and stated purpose is an elaborate cage constructed by the artificial intelligence Tet (Melissa Leo).

There are certainly shades of this to be found in Maverick, a film in which the pilots exist as part of the larger machinery of the U.S. Air Force and fly some of the most advanced technology on the planet, but it gets somewhat overshadowed by Cruise’s star power. There is arguably more of Kosinski in Spiderhead, the Netflix movie he released the same summer, set in a cutting-edge prison where warden Steve Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth) experiments on inmates like Jeff (Miles Teller).

Perhaps it makes sense that F1 was produced by Apple. F1 is not built on a science-fiction premise like TRON: Legacy, Oblivion or even Spiderhead. It does not take place in some alternate universe or distant future. It is set in the same modern day as Top Gun: Maverick. However, it is also a much sleeker version of the modern day. The world of F1 looks more like those of TRON: Legacy or Oblivion, lots of smooth, polished and shiny reflective surfaces often accented with neon glows.

Much has been made of the visceral experience of F1. Apple even released a “haptic” trailer to allow the audience some sense of the sensation of driving while watching Sonny at work. F1 was filmed “for IMAX”, and the movie features its share of impressively exciting racing sequences optimized for the format. The sound design is particularly impressive and immersive. F1 positions itself as a good old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes summer blockbuster, and delivers on those terms.

However, there is something more interesting happening beneath the hood. For a movie about men in fast cars, F1 makes it clear that this sort of racing is a team sport. More than that, it is about tactics and engineering as much as it is about skill. There is a strong emphasis on luck as a factor that is more influential than individual skill. Sonny is constantly playing with a deck of cards, dealing himself a card before each race for luck. Key decisions play out over a game of Texas Hold ‘Em at a bar table.

Throughout F1, Kosinski shoots offices, workshops and simulators with the same intensity that he brings to the movie’s racing sequences. For a film about white-knuckle speed, F1 is filled with overlays and graphics. Kosinski will often layer the frame with scoreboards or maps, laying out the racetrack or following his characters on an overhead readout. F1 is a film that encourages its audience to think about what is happening in technical terms, as well as emotive ones.

While Sonny is introduced as the sort of driver who sleeps in his own trailer, drifting from one job to another, he is no technophobe. Sonny grills technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) on the limits of her technical simulations, as Kosinski lovingly shoots fans, tires and treadmills. Sonny spends entire days in another virtual simulator designing a new car. Later, his teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) uses the simulator to replay a tragic accident over and over.

This emphasis on design and engineering bleeds out beyond theoretical spaces. Even the team’s garage looks more like a laboratory than the sort of workshops that might appear in a Fast and Furious movie, complete with lumbar-supporting chairs and a staff dressed in perfectly matching (and never dirtied) uniforms. There is rarely a hair out of place. Everything – and everyone – is part of a well-oiled machine that is designed to work at optimal efficiency.

F1 suggests that there is little difference between Sonny and the machine. Before the team’s penultimate race on the Las Vegas strip, Sonny’s reengineered car is ruled illegal as a result of fabricated documents leaked by Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies). The car is confiscated. Driving in the older car, Sonny is thrown off his game. He crashes, at which point his old friend Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) discovers that Sonny is literally being held together by metal pins.

During the film’s final race in Abu Dhabi, Sonny’s body threatens to give out as the car falters around him. His vision blurs. He loses focus. As the car wobbles and limps into the pit, Sonny himself seems to be coming apart. Between races, Sonny tries to repair some of the damage that the sport has inflicted upon his body by sitting in an ice bath in the storage space where the team keeps the spare tires. Kosinski shoots these sequences as if Sonny is ready to be slotted back into the driver’s seat.

Indeed, Sonny’s arc over the course of F1 is learning that he needs to function as part of the team, that he is essentially just one cog in this much larger engine around him. To be fair, this sort of character arc is not uncommon in movies like this, stories about overconfident jocks learning that they are more than just themselves. Humility is to be commended, as is the realization that there exists some greater purpose beyond one’s self.

At the same time, this theme somewhat clashes with the rugged individualism of the movie star movie. Tellingly, the character who has to learn this lesson in Maverick was supporting character Jake "Hangman" Seresin (Glen Powell), rather than either of the two leads, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom Cruise) or Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw (Miles Teller). In the second half of the original Top Gun, Pete needs to learn that he is too introspective and not confident enough.

In contrast, F1 spends a lot of time on the tactics and logic of high-speed car racing. In his first professional race, Sonny seems to have trouble starting the car during the warm-up lap, which is a source of potential embarrassment. However, this turns out to be a clever strategic ruse. By delaying his out start-up lap, he ensures that his competitors’ tires have cooled by the time he is in position and his are warmed up and optimized for the race.

Once Sonny realizes that he is part of a larger machine, he quickly figures out how to exploit rules and loopholes to engineer opportunities for Joshua to pull ahead, treating the sport itself as a machine. He causes accidents to make the other racers slow down, he sabotages the track to buy his colleague time to get to the pit, he blocks the leader to clear a path for his teammate. Sonny clearly sees the sport as a technical problem as much as a contest of speed.

F1 naturally makes concessions to the standard sports movie tropes. Sonny and Kate start a whirlwind romance. Despite engineering a set of circumstances designed to give Joshua a clear path to victory, it is ultimately Joshua who sacrifices to allow Sonny to win the final race. Still, throughout the movie, there is a sense that Sonny isn’t interested in external validation. He refuses trophies multiple times and insists “it’s not about the money.”

For Sonny, Formula One is about the challenge, and part of that challenge lies in understanding and manipulating the larger system to achieve an optimal outcome. In this way, F1 feels reflective of Kosinski’s broader preoccupation as a storyteller and as a filmmaker. Kosinski brings the eye of an architect and the thought process of an engineer to his projects, and it runs as a throughline from TRON: Legacy to F1. It feels almost perfectly engineered to Kosinski’s interests.