F1 the Movie has taken the top step of the Hollywood podium. It’s been hailed a blockbuster success with a huge opening weekend at the box office raking in US$144 million globally. It’s actor Brad Pitt’s biggest opening weekend, ever.
Directed by Joseph Kosinski who also directed Top Gun: Maverick, the film stars Pitt who plays Sonny Hayes, touted ‘the greatest that never was’, a 50-something-year-old vagabond racer who cares about the cause, not the money, roaming the world to compete in any race where he’s given a seat.
Javier Bardem who plays the APX F1 team boss, is a former teammate of Hayes’ and convinces him to take a F1 seat for one last shot to be the greatest of all time. The struggling team needs a miracle to prevent investors from taking action that could see the team collapse.
Naturally, it wouldn’t be a Hollywood film without drama and romance. There’s tension between Hayes and his young upstart teammate played by Damson Idris, and a tangent forbidden romance between Hayes and his team engineer played by Kerry Condon.
There’s been much promotion and hype around this film, with no escaping it if you’re regular watcher of Formula 1 races.
Does the film live up to the hype? Is it worth forking out to see it on the big screen?
The racing action is undeniably fantastic. Never before in the history of sport worldwide, in any discipline, has Hollywood had access like it has had with Formula 1. Real life racing action, real F1 drivers, real crashes and incidents all make for thrilling viewing.
F1 fans will love that the star-studded movie includes all ten F1 teams and drivers from 2023 onwards including Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz, Charles Le Clerc, George Russell, Sergio Pérez, Fernando Alonso and more. Getting glimpses of team bosses, commentators, and even the pets of the paddock are lures themselves.
It gets the adrenalin pumping and seeing F1 on the big screen was worth the ticket price alone. In my case, it was $15 for a recliner seat at Orana Cinemas in Busselton, a bargain.
There are negatives and the biggest one is how women are portrayed. Simply put, it’s poor.
In the film, the Condon’s character Kate McKenna quickly falls for the charms of Hayes, about 12 seconds after she says she doesn’t play around with teammates, reducing her to his love interest. Hayes does acknowledge that it would have taken grit to become a team engineer and then tells McKenna what she needs to do to create a competitive car. Surely a woman in her position doesn’t need a man who has not raced in F1 cars for 30 years tell her how to do her job.
Like many readers, I grew up in the 70s and 80s where this sort of ‘mansplaining’ was the norm. That doesn’t make this okay. It could be easy to brush it off as Hollywood and entertainment, but it doesn’t set a good example for all the young girls out there who have their down dreams of working in F1, my teenage niece included.
What really had me shaking my head was seeing the only female member of the pit crew fumble and make a costly mistake. Why did that role have to be played by a woman, the only woman in the crew? Why couldn’t it have been a young male apprentice crumbling under pressure of a tyre change in a pit stop?
Then there’s the nightclub scene where a young female F1 fan asks if she can be introduced to Carlos Sainz, insinuating that female F1 fans are nothing more than groupies who want to sleep with racing car drivers.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but I can’t help but feel that Formula 1 owners Liberty Media and all the movie producers have a responsibility to do better in this area.
The sport itself has made huge strides to be more inclusive and attract more fans which includes the fastest growing segment, females aged between 16 and 25.
In real life F1, this year we’ve seen Laura Müller become the first female race engineer (for Estaban Ocon in the HAAS team), more women in teams in general, more visible women in the media in commentary teams, and F1 Academy, the all-female development series, with its own Netflix show.
Perhaps I should remind myself that it’s entertainment, not a documentary.
With Brad Pitt, 61, in the starring role, and Kerry Condon, 42, in a supporting role, one thing we can’t accuse the movie of is being ageist. It’s refreshing to see older people in a young person’s domain, using their experience to play the game and win.
If you like action films, it’s worth seeing F1 the Movie on the big screen – go for the entertainment value, it’s worth it for that alone.
