F1 (2025)

Rated PG-13, but it slightly (but only slightly) pushes that limit.  The big thing is that there is an f-bomb in the movie.  But if I was really being sensitive to things that my kids shouldn't watch, I'd want to include the paradoxical dangerous, near-death moments coupled with the fact that these characters just tend to walk away from events that absolutely should have killed them.  Also, there is a scene where two characters sleep with each other.  That scene is pretty tame, but it still is in the movie.

DIRECTOR:  Joseph Kosinski

Okay, there are some downsides to expanding the Best Picture category to ten films.  When they first made the ten films thing, I got excited.  It opened the door to nominations that might have been a little riskier.  But F1 might be the example of a movie that almost makes no sense as a Best Picture nomination, not because it's bad, but because it is possible the most average movie that I've ever seen.

Like, I could almost see F1 get nominated MAYBE for cinematography.  It's not a poorly made movie by any stretch of the imagination.  These cars are filmed beautifully, but that's not an excuse to call this a Best Picture. This is a movie that seems like a summer blockbuster.  Now, this is me arguing against myself.  I've been saying for a while that the summer blockbuster has been snubbed by the Academy.  But I'm looking at 2025 in isolation.  This has been a year with some incredible movies.  I was a big fan of some of the movies that came out in 2025, most notably Superman.  Superman was one of my favorite movies of the past few years, especially when it came to genre storytelling.  But here's the rub:  I wouldn't be throwing a stink about Superman getting snubbed if it wasn't for something like F1.

I get Superman not getting nominated.  I don't agree with that course of action, but I at least get it.  The Academy has been notorious for kind of being snobbish towards fun movies.  I actually find how much the Oscars embraced The Lord of the Rings shocking.  Those are incredibly quality films that changed the landscape of visual storytelling, but they were still incredibly fun.  F1 is fun.  It's not the most fun.  But it's a movie that is trying to be fun.  But it also kind of lacks any kind of deep quality.  I knew what movie I was seeing before I saw it.  Honestly, I looked at the poster, guessed what the movie was going to be, and was mostly right throughout.  Now, there's this thing in my film class talking about the joys of meeting expectations and the joys of defying expectations.  Sometimes people want what they want.  But when I think of Best Pictures at the Oscars, I want something more than "predictable fun".  Continue making movies like F1.  I don't care.  As you see, I eventually get around to them.  (Although, to be self-critical, I might have only watched this movie because it got the Oscar nom.) It's just that I don't see what all of the hullabaloo is about.

One of the most bananas things about F1 is that it really expects you to shut your brain off to jargon.  I've always been (no pun intended) cold towards John LeCarre stuff.  He's the spy guy who always keeps his spy stories jargon heavy.  It's meant to give the film a sense of authenticity.  Now, I'm not saying that stories shouldn't be deeply accurate.  But there are tricks to welcome a new audience into these stories.  Usually, when movies are throwing around racing jargon, there's some guy on the side asking "What is going on?" and the film will have the good graces to explain that, using that character as an avatar for the audience.  I mean, there are definitely moments where jargon is able to be deduced through context.  I found out that warm tires are better than cold tires and that milliseconds and fractions of seconds are incredibly important when it comes to racing.  But I have no idea what "dirty air" means.  I have no idea what "C for combat" means.  I got the "C for chaos" thing does.  "C for chaos" explained itself pretty quick.  Sonny would mess up the track by sacrificing his own car so that JP could get ahead.  Okay, that makes sense.  The problem with the "C for combat" element was that it looked like every other racing thing in the movie.  I didn't really see how building the car for "combat" meant anything besides the fact that it was an extremely fragile car.  

The more I think about the movie, the more low-key bothered I am by the artificial tension between Sonny and JP.  I mean, it's the core of any buddy duo.  There has to be something internal that is stopping you from getting your external goal.  We knew that this was going to be a rookie versus old-timer story.  It's right there on the screen.  (It's also weird that Brad Pitt is embracing the "old guy" trope, but also becoming this generation's Robert Redford.) Okay, there's the narrative that JP hates losing the center of attention because he's a big fish in a small pond.  But JP starts trusting Sonny and Sonny really does have his best interest at heart.  Obviously, part of the narrative is that JP is incredibly immature and starving for attention, so he causes his own downfall.  But in an attempt to make it look like these are two stubborn idiots on equal footing, it puts a lot of the blame on Sonny.  I never really understood that.  I'm talking about the accident in the rain.  The first act of the movie shows Sonny being bad at this.  I get it.  It's "I'm not great, but I'll get better by the end."  But Sonny's internal conflict isn't how good a driver he is.  His internal conflict is the fact that he can't work with a partner.  So the message that is hammered his way through the first act or so is that he needs to put his teammate's needs in front of his own.

And he does it.  That entire race that leads to JP's accident is Sonny doing the thing that people have been giving him crap about the entire time.  But the movie shifts responsibility to Sonny.  JP's mom blames Sonny for the accident.  Everyone seems to blame Sonny for the accident.  I know that it's a sign that he's repeating the past, but that's not what the story told us up to that point.  Sonny is punished for doing the right thing and makes him unlearn his lesson for the sake of stalling the picture.  From there, the movie gives JP a lot of little devils that hang out on JP's shoulders.  Everyone is planting the seed in JP's ear that Sonny is trying to take his place and I get all that.  It just feels like the first third of the movie would have actually been way more powerful if that artificial tension wasn't there.  Imagine if the movie started off with JP mad at his racing team for constantly letting him down.  In comes this legend who is trying to figure out how to do this again.  And the two trust each other, like they do in the final act of this movie.  Then, Sonny gets a bit too enthusiastic and repeats the mistake of his past, causing JP to crash.  That moment, when all of those selfish members of JP's entourage start planting ideas in JP's head?  That's the internal conflict.  That's far more interesting to me.  I don't need the second act to simply repeat the first act's beats.

Honestly, the whole thing feels a little empty to me. I wonder if I would be so let down if I wasn't watching it as an Oscar condender.  But I hear that this movie is going to be sequelized because it made so much money.  There's something completely vapid about that attitude.  The story is told.  If this is the story of a man's second chance to undo the past, why would I need another story?  The guy won.  And if I'm so prescient about what the first movie was about, I can already tell you what the second movie might be about.  Theories!  1) JP is winning race hand-over-foot.  When he starts losing his way or his love for racing, he turns to Sonny to remind him that it's all about the basics of racing.  2) JP takes a rookie under his wing, but lacks that spark in motivating or bonding with this racer.  He brings Sonny in to get another look at this kid.  3) Sonny has chased every race available and finds himself lost, unable to deal with himself.  JP has to trade places with him to remind himself what racing is all about.  See?  These things write themselves. I want more than this.  This was as formulaic as you can get.