With the new season of Drive to Survive now available to watch on Netflix, and a new season of racing under way it's a good time to be an F1 fan. Still, while there have been some absolutely jaw-dropping documentaries over the years (none more so than the fantastic Senna), the sport has perhaps been missing a truly impressive fictional movie to really amp up its popularity.
That gap looks like it's going to be filled later this year, though, when Apple TV+ brings out F1, the simply named dramatisation of just what it's like to sit down in one of the fastest vehicles on the planet for a race. The movie just got a full trailer after months of tiny teasers, and it looks like it might be envelope-pushing in how immersive it is.
F1 will star Brad Pitt as veteran driver Sonny Hayes, who's been a big name on the US motorsport circuit for years but gets a big break when the owner of an F1 team approaches him with the offer of a seat. He's going to be paired with Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a rookie with unbelievable pace but perhaps lacking the perspective of what it takes to win at this level.
They'll form an odd partnership that marries grit with raw talent, and hope to shake up the championship and go for glory. That all sounds great, and pretty typical sporting movie stuff, but it's the way F1 was filmed that looks really jaw-dropping. In the trailer we get to see some racing moments, with cameras strapped to the cars in interesting places giving unreal footage.
It looks like we'll get point-of-view shots in the cockpit, but also external ones that really show just how incredibly fast the action is at this level, as well as drone shots and other inventive approaches. It's clear that the movie aims to make you really feel the visceral sense of speed that drivers experience in F1, and the fact that its director made Top Gun: Maverick only furthers that aim.
After all, that excellent summer blockbuster redefined our expectations of how aerial sequences can even be filmed, so if F1 can do the same for race scenes it'll be an automatic success. As a seriously big ticket movie, this one will hit cinemas first (on 27 June in the US, and 25 June internationally), but since it's an Apple original I'd be confident that it'll come to Apple TV+ before the end of the year, for a blockbuster home cinema experience on one of the best streaming services going.
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