MOVIE REVIEW: F1 (2025)

Brad Pitt’s return to the screen isn’t just a role—it’s a resurrection. A celebration. A reckoning with what it means to be a man in a world that no longer knows what to do with one.

He grips the wheel. Not just of a Formula One car—but of his identity, his past, and the collective imagination of manhood itself.

Brad Pitt, playing Sonny Hayes, isn’t just portraying a character—he’s channeling an archetype. The man’s man. Weathered. Flawed. Relentlessly alive. He embodies a truth modern culture often tries to bury: that masculinity, in its raw, roaring, unapologetic form, still matters.

And it’s glorious.

THE MACHINE AS METAPHOR

Let’s be honest—this isn’t just a racing movie. This is warfare with rubber and steel. Formula One, that unholy fusion of physics and bravado, becomes a stage for cosmic drama: where chaos meets calculation, where risk defines purpose, where men—real men—bleed to matter. The cockpit becomes a crucible. The racetrack? A liturgy of death and speed.

And Brad Pitt? He’s our high priest.

THE CHARACTER: SONNY HAYES

Sonny Hayes is not a relic—he is a response. A man out of time, yes—but because time itself has lost the plot. In a world obsessed with neutering danger and sanitizing myth, Sonny walks in with scars on his face and fuel in his veins. He’s been chewed up by the system. Cheated by youth. Cast out by the boardroom elites who trade risk for revenue.

And yet—he drives.

Not because he must. Because he can.

He is Achilles behind a visor.

He is Hemingway with a gearbox.

He is every man who ever felt the call of the edge and said, “Let them watch me fall.”

MASCULINITY IN THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS

Let’s not mince words—this film is a sermon. A fast, brutal, beautiful sermon about the nature of masculinity when it is neither commodified nor castrated. Sonny is not perfect—he’s not supposed to be. He drinks too much, loves too little, and speaks in terse philosophies scraped from the underside of experience. But that’s the point. Real men are forged, not fashioned.

What does it mean to mentor in an age of confusion?

To compete in an age of participation?

To stand—when the world tells you to sit down and “process your feelings”?

Sonny doesn’t just race. He refuses to surrender. And that refusal is the film’s moral thesis.

SYSTEMS, POWER, AND THE MAN WHO DEFIES THEM

The F1 world in this film is no utopia—it’s a hyper-capitalist arena of telemetry and tech overlords, where every ounce of human spirit is threatened by the creeping algorithm. And Sonny? He’s a glitch. A beautiful, burning anomaly in the system. A man too alive for the metrics.

And so the powers that be—young executives, engineers glued to screens, culture critics with soft hands and big opinions—try to tame him. They can’t. Because what Sonny represents cannot be coded. It must be lived.

It must be suffered.

PHILOSOPHY IN MOTION

The film flirts—no, flames—with deeper questions. What is man without risk? What is freedom without danger? What is life if it cannot be lost?

Here’s the truth modernity forgets: Man is meant to wrestle with death. Not in despair—but in glory. Sonny Hayes races not to escape death, but to stare it down and smile. Because only in confronting our mortality do we become immortal.

As the ancients knew, as the warriors knew, as the saints and sinners knew—to feel deeply, to risk wholly, is to be human.

THE MYTHIC DIMENSION

There is something biblical about this story. Sonny’s fall and rise echo the cycles of Moses, David, Peter—men called, broken, and called again. Men whose greatness was not their flawlessness but their refusal to be erased. Sonny is not just a driver; he’s a prophet of the pavement. A man willing to lose to mean something.

In an age that confuses safety with salvation, F1 reminds us: Men are not made in comfort. They are made in fire.

FINAL LAP: A CALL TO THE SOUL

Let the critics whimper about tropes. Let the commentators tweet about “toxic masculinity” or “old myths.” They’ve missed the point.

This isn’t regression.

This is reclamation.

“F1” doesn’t ask permission to exist.

It demands that you feel it.

And you will.

You will feel the roar of the engine as a call to remember who you are. You will see Brad Pitt not as a celebrity—but as a mirror. A mirror held up to every man who ever wanted to live not for applause, but for honor. For glory. For meaning.

VERDICT:

This is not just a movie.

It’s a testament.

To the edge.

To the fall.

To the fire.

To the man’s man—alive and screaming down the straightaway, leaving fear in the dust.

5/5. No seatbelt required.