24 frames per second

I recently watched F1 on an Imax screen. The film isn’t trying to break new ground emotionally or dramatically (it’s as though, after revisiting top gun from an older man’s perspective, Kozinski wanted to do the same thing to Days of Thunder – incidentally both were by Tony Scott).

But from a filmmaking standpoint, it’s absolutely lovely – the man is able to conceive of some great visuals and then deliver them, with a kick ass soundtrack to match.

At its heart, F1 is a simple sport: you drive a car in a race, as fast as you can. but the fast is really really fast, the car is a really complicated piece of machinery and you might gain a fraction of a second per lap sitting not behind the wheel but at a laptop doing computational fluid dynamics. And the actual race has a fairly complicated set of rules, and strategy about when to use what kind of tyre, and what not.

Kosinsky takes all of those elements and gives us a narrative that’s both lucid and engaging, and the visceral experience of being behind the wheel at the race. The access to the actual F1 season (where many portions were shot) gives it all a sense of verisimilitude. All of which deserves kudos.

F1 fans (of which I am not one) will likely find plenty to ooh and aah about. A lot of the little technical touches would probably appeal to them, in much the same way that the cricketing nous in the writing of Lagaan appealed to a cricket-mad nation a quarter of a century ago.

So what remains is the writing and acting.

The characters are archetypes and the acting doesn’t add or subtract from the writing. The bromance between Pitt and Bardem is probably the warmest thing about the film.

Simply in terms of getting a clear structure (9 races, broken down into a 3 act structure of 3 each), closing all the open parantheses (a line asking what it’s all about if not the money finds an echo later, a first class trip across half a planet in the beginning gets a callback in the end, a little mystery about a random card picked from a deck is given a cute sort of closure)… The script does so many little things well that one is inclined to forgive the often pedestrian dialogue, the laughable villain, and some of the other missteps. Overall, I actually found the writing here to be better than in Maverick, to be honest. It’s not deep, but it’s solid.

Is it worth watching? On Imax? You bet! Also, when someone spends this much money to make a film about humans doing very human things (that nonetheless appear superhuman to anyone who has driven in Bengaluru), well, you give it a dekko.