No AI can do what Brad Pitt does so effortlessly, or thoughtlessly
dir: Joseph Kosinski
2025
The fuck did I just watch?
People are lamenting the coming onslaught of AI generated movies, and I have to say, faithful readers, it’s way, way too late. It’s not too late because the technology is coming; all that shit is already here. But it’s way too late because humans are just that lazy. They’re lazy enough to try to generate this crap, and we’re so lazy we’ll just swallow the slop because the alternative is too hard.
You may be able to prove to me that there are humans in this flick. There are some lovely humans in this flick. Kerry Condon is one of them. Kerry Condon, who probably earned more from this flick than she’s ever made in her entire career up to this point, is not only definitely human but she’s also a wonderful actor to behold and to listen to. She doesn’t do a thing to hide her strong Irish accent, and while that’s something AI can mimic, it can’t imitate her obvious humanity.
But she is tasked with lines of dialogue no human could ever have written, and she has to act against computer generated special effects like Brad Pitt, who has rarely if ever made for a convincing human being.
And Javier Bardem. He’s human. Irrepressibly human. He’s so human that he even convinces you he can see Brad Pitt when he’s standing in front of him (we know it’s a special effect / hologram, surely?) and that he even interacts with him. He cannot but give his all, whether it’s in this or any other flick or tv series. Speaking of series, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Javier Bardem is in this AND in the Apple TV series Cape Fear playing Yosemite Sam, sorry, I mean Max Cady, the role made famous by DeNiro and Mitchum, both Roberts, before him.
What I’m getting at, since Apple ponied up the cash for this hollow holographic monstrosity, they clearly have something on Bardem. If it’s a contract, I feel like it’s maybe made of human skin and maybe is signed in blood or something?
Bardem plays a wealthy former Formula One race car driver who has escalated his fortunes to owning the worst team in the competition. So badly go the team’s fortunes that he will lose all the money he invested and get nothing when the team is forced into selling.
I don’t know anything about Formula One. I maybe don’t know anything about Capitalism and the law, but even I know that this scenario is not possible in the human world.
But if I know that, how come the script doesn’t? Because AI doesn’t know when what it regurgitates is wrong, all it “knows” is how approximate a set of parameters are to other sets of parameters. And so that sort of approximates stakes in a flick that, really, has none whatsoever.
Bardem, playing Ruben, pursues a former team mate, called Sonny (Brad Pitt) because someone as charming, as intelligent as a character Javier Bardem would play obviously suffered from a catastrophic stroke that severely impacted on his frontal lobe, erasing all reason and judgement. If you were running an F1 team that wasn’t doing too well, and you thought enlisting a guy in his 60s you used to know in the 1990s to save your arse is a good idea against pushing those debt collectors back, you may have already died, and you’re having one of those death dreams before either the spotlight / ascending elevator of Heaven or the Dyson vacuum / inescapable black hole of Hell beckon to you.
Sonny had an accident nearly 35 years ago that nearly killed him, but he’s okay. He’s so okay that he races for anything anyone hires him to do, and that’s how he gets by in his van. We see him win the Daytona 24 hour and refuse the watch that’s meant to go along with the prize money (I’m guessing it’s a Rolex Daytona?) because, in his own less than immortal words, he already has one.
The watch brand new is worth $80,000 in gold, $140,000 in platinum, and a guy living hand to mouth in a van would knock that back?
See, some things are more important than money.
We’re never really told what those things are. But we’ll keep being told that line in a sport where the drivers are millionaires and the team owners are billionaires. Sure, money doesn’t matter at all when you have oodles of it.
We are meant to presume that it’s Sonny’s integrity that’s worth more than money, but honestly, it’s never clear how someone who hasn’t raced at the top level in nearly 4 decades is still preternaturally good enough to compete (but not win) anything for almost the entire duration of the film.
Again, I don’t pretend to know anything about how the whole world of F1 operates, but I know enough to know that most of these races don’t look at all like the actual races that occur, and that before they have the official, important, well attended races, they have these things call time trials, which dictate where on the grid one’s car is situated where the race begins.
Marvel at my grasp of how F1 racing work: usually the teams with the best drivers and cars do very well in the trials, and so start towards the front of the pack, if not in so-called pole position itself. Teams with not as great cars and not as adept drivers (who are still elite athletes capable of something 99% of us are not in cars that took tens if not hundreds of millions in designing and engineering costs to perfect) start lower in the grid and have very little chance of winning anything outright.
In this film? None of that matters. None of it is even mentioned, so that the strange flick can roll along as a contest between two team mates who never have an actual conversation over the course of 2 hours and 40 minutes.
I’m not the first person who’s mentioned this, and I won’t be the last: even given its entirely generic sports triumph formula, the flick is most of all what you get when you ask a large language model to generate a script with prompts along the lines of “write a script based on Top Gun: Maverick but with Formula One cars instead of fighter jets”.
And if you think that’s glib, it is, but even Jodi Foster herself says that she watched this flick and is convinced it was generated by a mediocre AI.
Not one of those really good ones, no. In this version of Top Gun Vroom the old veteran doesn’t so much take the young neophyte under his wing so much as most of the film transpires as if they’re never in the same room together conversing at the same time, and as if they’re never on the same course or in the same race, despite being team mates. The young guy, Damson Idris, will be charming and great in other films, but he isn’t allowed to do much in this flick beyond imitating a cardboard cut-out of a race car driver as envisioned by an eight-year-old boy.
His character is clearly based on Lewis Hamilton, who doesn’t need any help in raising his profile, and who briefly appears in split second shots in the flick, and is allegedly in many of the races that occur, including the last ‘important’ one. But we know he was never within a 100 kilometres of this production other than by coincidence. They filmed a bunch of footage, or the AI hallucinated a bunch of footage based on the 2023-2024 seasons, and they spliced it in with all the other nonsense to make it look ‘real’.
There are some prominent F1 personalities that appear, but they’re only in the flick to give the middle-aged man fervently watching this flick an opportunity to lean over to his partner and grunt “do you know who that was, that was Frederic Vasseur, the head guy at Ferrari!”, as his bored wife doesn’t even bother to respond, because she’s listening to a true crime podcast with her earbuds in anyway. Thankfully they’re noise-cancelling, so all of her husband’s bold and insightful interjections are met with the stony silence they deserve.
As for the races themselves, just like Top Gun: Maverick, there is a lot of emphasis on ‘real’ footage of ‘real’ races and cars to give the film more of a feeling of solidity, of weight, of reality. Sure. All that’s true in theory. In reality, a lot of this footage is so over-edited that it ends up making not that much of a difference.
Again as for the races themselves, the charming maverick outsider Sonny does all sorts of shit in these races that would get you not just banned and fined but disqualify your team for entire seasons. In one race he cheekily and completely innocently causes multiple accidents at a speed of 240kms per hour that could easily have resulted in multiple deaths, but it’s all a testament to his veteran skills and brinksmanship, and even his own team are like “wow, he’s so great even though we’re all disqualified, we should all have his geriatric babies” when they should be like “ew, go away old pervert”.
But who’s going to tell Brad Pitt to stop what he’s doing? No-one. Not this director, not Javier Bardem, not Kerry Condon. After Pitt scored an Oscar for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you think anyone can stop him from playing a cool, laconic guy who stares off into the middle distance and never seems too bothered by anything?
After forty years he finally found something that works as a substitute for being an actor, and there’s no fucking way he’s going to stop now. AIs beware: you can’t approximate that level of soullessness.
This is such a dad movie it embarrasses me. I am a dad. I can’t fight the remote sometimes. It made me click on this. I did not enjoy it, I do not recommend it, and I spent more time trying to figure out what wristwatches actors were wearing rather than trying to parse the dramaturgical complexities on display in this Dionysian / Apollonian dichotomous emblem of man’s struggle over the seductiveness of the machines.
5 times “car goes vroom” seems like it’s still a winning formula out of 10
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”If the last thing I do is drive that car, I will take that life, man.” – I hear you, man, that's pretty deep, man - F1
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