The best strategy is going fast. That’s a tidbit shared sarcastically in Joseph Kosinski’s F1 but is also emphatically true. Nobody wins races without going as fast as they can. Likewise, a proper F1 movie ought to be lightning fast and capture the blistering speed of real race cars.
The Joseph Kosinski project has become about adaptive filmmaking. His approach to filming starts with hardware. Like his last film, Top Gun: Maverick ((2022), Spiderhead doesn’t exist), F1 is about capturing previously impossible footage through innovative camera rigging.
Rather than using cars built for a movie and then filming around those constraints, producer and F1 legend Lewis Hamilton advised the team that the only way to capture it was to use real race cars. So they have. Real race cars, of course, are not built around sensory camera footage, so the teams at Mercedes, Apple, and Sony, built F2 cars that suited the completely new Motorsport cinematography. F1 cars, naturally, are off-limits (as they are not built for any modification that is not for racing), so this is as authentic as a movie can get.
The results are thrilling in the action of it all. There are so many angles and shots that feel like F1 fantasies, as the cars are mounted with a dozen or so possible points for filming. Just as the recent Top Gun explored how to thrillingly shoot inside the cockpit of a jet, F1 fully explores the possibilities of shooting in and around a car, and it’s all so deeply exciting.
Racing purists may steady their critique, as the movie is distinctly commercial and driven by Hollywood sentiment for how racing movies should go. Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes is a composite of historic F1 drivers — the kind of wizened, experience-hardened drivers with indelible comeback stories — think Niki Lauda and Mika Häkkinen — who defied death and then came back to outrace and out-adapt a far younger field. For Pitt, the role offers momentary salvation for his flagging reputation among audiences. His performance, which is good and involves actually driving cars amidst a field of real drivers on real tracks, is bolstered by good supporting turns by Damson Idris (a rookie who drives for the same team) and Javier Bardem (who is handsome and owns the race team). It’s the kind of movie where Brad Pitt’s character automatically qualifies because he walks up to the team with fantastic swagger, which is good enough to circumvent standard F1 rules and regulations where all drivers must qualify.
F1 is propulsive for its innovative cinematography but is also heightened by Hans Zimmer and Steve Mazzaro’s score — which is a head-on collision between pulsating synths and dramatically bowed cellos, surgically fusing electronic and orchestral sounds. Clashing against those, are the tones and thuds of rock guitars and drums, and when the soundtrack reaches max velocity, a super-fun track elevated by rapper Don Toliver — “Lose My Mind”.
Winning any race is about going fast. But it’s about all the things you do to go fast. F1 circumvents legit racing logic, favoring legit speed. To that end, it’s endlessly thrilling stuff and some of the year’s best action cinema, without any question or much close competition. The work done with cameras, likewise, takes what is a formula-driven Hollywood story, and fills it with modern craft and the will to create something new. The feeling is that it’s all a big rush. A shot to the nervous system full of cranked up speed and modular cameras developed for just this movie, once again deeply selling the action.
Yes, it’s the same movie as Top Gun: Maverick, applied to race cars. But that’s also some of the best action cinema of our time, and Joseph Kosinski is doing more to shape new cinematic experiences around previously impossible-to-film crafts than anyone else is doing in any other action category.
F1 is as deeply fun as it is deeply conventional. The crowd-pleasing movie of 2025 that does that job without any reservations. Like the great non-fiction series Drive to Survive (2019), F1 is a remarkable piece of commercial filmmaking, in that it’s simply a great commercial. It has very little to do with watching a real race — despite being shot on Grand Prix weekends on real tracks with some real drivers — but by design, it offers a fun and watchable inroad to the sport, which should broaden the tent. One question remains: What kind of hard-to-film vehicles will Kosinski make well-shot action movies about next?