Friday night I did something I almost never do anymore, which is pay full price for an opening-weekend movie ticket. F1 came out this weekend, the Brad Pitt racing movie Apple's been quietly bankrolling for what feels like three years, and I went to the 9:40pm IMAX show because my brother-in-law wanted to and I wasn't going to say no to a legitimately good excuse to leave the house.
The theater was packed. Not sold-out-Marvel-movie packed, but packed enough that we got seats in the third row and I spent the first twenty minutes negotiating a crick in my neck. My ticket alone was $21, before the $9 popcorn that I bought anyway because apparently I have no self control at a concession stand, ever, in my whole life.
Here's the thing though. I didn't go in expecting much from the plot and I was right not to. Its the Top Gun Maverick formula, almost beat for beat, which makes sense since Joseph Kosinski directed both and Jerry Bruckheimer produced both. Washed-up driver gets pulled back in, mentors a hotshot kid, team politics, one big race that fixes everything emotionally. Fine. I've seen worse. Damson Idris is genuinely good as the young driver and Javier Bardem is having a blast as the team owner.
What actually kept me leaned forward in my seat was the racing footage, and specifically how they got it. Apple and the production crew built real cars that could actually run in real Formula 1 sessions, then mounted custom camera rigs to them and filmed during actual Grand Prix weekends, cars weaving through the field during real practice sessions with real drivers on track. Lewis Hamilton produced the thing and was reportedly all over the technical side, pushing back when shots looked fake. You can tell. There's a texture to the on-track stuff, the way the picture shakes and the tire noise cuts in, that no simulator rig or green screen job gets right. I've sat through a dozen racing movies that fake the speed with editing tricks and this one mostly doesn't need to.
Which is the part that got me thinking on the drive home. This is Apple's biggest, most expensive movie bet yet, reportedly north of $200 million, and the pitch isn't really "watch our stars," its "watch what our camera technology can do while stapled to a car going 200 miles an hour." That's a very Apple thing to spend $200 million proving. They didn't build the F1 cars, they didn't build the racetracks, but they clearly obsessed over the lens.
And then I sat there in an AMC, watching a movie funded by a company whose streaming service I have never once subscribed to. I own the phone, the watch, two sets of AirPods, a laptop that's older than some of my coworkers, and I have never paid Apple a single dollar for Apple TV+. I don't even really know what's on it besides Ted Lasso and now, apparently, checks notes, this. There's something a little funny about a hardware company spending this much to get me into a theater seat for a movie that'll show up on a service I'm still not going to sign up for. Maybe that's the actual plan. Get me hooked on the theatrical cut, let the streaming numbers sort themselves out in a year.
Anyway. The screening had that weird collective quiet a good sports movie gets, where a whole room of strangers audibly reacts to a pass on the inside of a corner like we're all watching an actual race and not a scripted one. That part I liked more than I expected to. My neck did not thank me by the time we got to the end credits, third row IMAX is a young person's game and I am apparently no longer that, but I'd still go back for a normal-format screening just to see if the racing holds up without a giant curved screen doing half the work.
If you're the kind of person who reads a personal tech blog for movie reviews, sorry, not sorry. Sometimes the interesting technology story of the week isn't a chip or an app, its a couple hundred cameras bolted to cars going around Silverstone.