Seeing as a lot of us seem to have watched it by now it might be fun to talk about our thoughts. I’ll give a spoiler free review here and might go into more detail in the comments.
For me, the movie was almost exactly what I expected given the premise (Hollywood sports movie starring an aging Brad Pitt). But if you’re an F1 fan you don’t watch this for the story. Even then, there are some fanservice nods for us thrown in that I did smile at now and then, and even though the story takes a lot of liberties I was actually impressed at the amount of detail the movie goes into.
All that being said, you watch this for one reason alone: the shots of the racing. And they are spectacular. I wish they would linger a second or two longer instead of often jumping quickly between angles, but that’s my only criticism. They look fucking amazing and it is worth the price of admission. And do yourself a favour and watch it in IMAX. Some of those shots are just breathtaking.
I was surprised at the blatant inaccuracies in it after all that chat about getting the right sound for 5th gear etc etc.
But agree, I was there for the racing footage mainly, which was good as expected.
The story is a joke though honestly, it’s not a “good” movie. One criticism I agree with is that brad pitt’s character doesn’t go on any journey at all really, he has no arc at all.
They had the pieces on the board to make a fine story I think, it just seems like there were multiple cliques within the writing team and they couldn’t agree on a vision so the narrative gets pulled in different directions.
If Brad Pitt could have gotten over himself and not demanded to be the underdog hero who gets the girl and wins the race we might have gotten something actually interesting.