Need for Speed: F1

F1 is an agreeably human-sized big-screen spectacle getting all of its excitement and thrill out of revving engines, squealing tires, and the intense effort of merging and passing on the race track. The movie is as sleek and aerodynamic as the F1 race cars zooming past. It’s director Joseph Kosinski’s first theatrical effort since Top Gun Maverick and, fittingly, extends his interest in professionalism, process, turning gears, and speed. It’s also a fine blending of a few reliable sports movie storylines: the underdog rookie, the old-man’s-still-got-it, and the unlikely comeback of the last place team. It knows that that’s the same blend that made Maverick such a crowd-pleaser, and invests in a high-gloss aesthetic that highlights the tensions and delights inherent in such high-velocity earnest expressions of such well-worn tropes. It helps that the plot lines are inhabited by charismatic Movie Stars who match the movie’s aims. The old timer is Brad Pitt at his most reliable craggy modern mode, with a sly charm and a grizzled grumpiness. He brings a magnetic screen presence to a fidgety confidence, and agitated stillness. His character used to be a hot shot F1 driver before flaming out 30 years hence. He’s called back to race at the behest of an old teammate turned tycoon, a slick and strutting Javier Bardem. The team he owns is the last place one, under threat of a hostile takeover unless he can run up some wins. The underestimated underdog is a firecracker up-and-comer, all hustle and muscle, a winning smile and a need to prove himself. It’s his first time called up to the league and he’s afraid he’s on the precipice of blowing his big break. That role goes to Damson Idris, in a similar spot in his career as a TV lead (John Singleton’s FX drama Snowfall) making his first jump to leading a blockbuster. Because the star personas fit so neatly into the characters, it adds a jolt to what could be shallow cliches as the old man and the young man arrive with competing energy and must learn to drive as a team if they hope to accomplish their goals. The supporting cast of pros, from charming engineer Kerry Condon to sleazy suit Tobias Menzies, bring a charming believability to stock roles. It’s lively and lived-in even when it's familiar. Kosinski’s too good at the rhythms of pros hard at work. Even his firefighter tragedy Only the Brave, mad scientist thriller Spiderhead, and programmers-in-the-program sequel Tron Legacy get that right. F1’s up there with his best efforts. It’s a movie of smooth and propulsive energy because of Kosinski’s camera’s steady gaze and the buttery editing between sleek shots. It has Top Gun velocity and thrill, minus the militarism, to the ways a car hurtles around a curve or glides aerodynamically past screaming crowds and gleaming skylines. And it gains its suspense and wit not just from spectacle, but from the endless work, good strategy, and fluke luck it takes to win. 

Lab Rats: SPIDERHEAD

The animating tension of Spiderhead is in the friction between its surface and its undertow. The setting is an ocean front compound on a remote island, a research facility that looks more like a high-tech resort, with lots of wide-open communal spaces and clean architectural lines. It is photographed in bright, clean frames with lots of light and soft colors. The furniture looks like upscale Ikea, and the diegetic soundtrack is slick with all the smoothest jams of 80s pop rock. Ah, but the content and intent of this place is menacing, chilled with moral quandaries, and driving toward a bad end that’s inevitable from frame one. Here prisoners (like Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollett) have volunteered to live as test subjects for a devious billionaire (Chris Hemsworth) who chummily lives among them. He’s fitted them with chemical packs on their backs which he operates from an app on his phone, able to dial up emotional states and biological urges with the flick of his finger. He runs them through tests—can he make them laugh at tragedy, find industrial waste beautiful, want to make love to an unappealing partner? This can’t be going anywhere good.

The film carefully keeps the prisoners’ crimes as backstory to be doled out later, the better to front-load their inherent humanity. We see who they are without the distraction of that emotional scale-tipping, and when we hear their tragic circumstances and decisions that sent them here, we can all the more clearly understand that no one deserves to be forced into this system. It’s torture disguised as comfort. They’re threatened with return to a normal penitentiary if they don’t consent to each new dose. Some are starting to suspect they’d be better off leaving. That they stay is credit to their wickedly charming warden, an athlesuire-wearing faux-chummy tech bro who talks to them like buddies and co-conspirators more than prisoners. He makes them feel a part of the team, like they’re doing valuable work. Why, he’s wearing a pack of chemicals, too. Hemsworth, projecting a whirling confidence and slick shrewdness, plays him as a perfectly slimy brand of modern billionaire. As suspicions about this guy and his project grow, Teller dials into a stoic sorrow, slowly crumbling under the pressures of being made to feel against his will. He’s trying to drown out the sorrows of his past, unable and unwilling to forgive himself for what he’s done. Smollett, too, is keeping her distance from who she was, forging new connections in this gilded prison. (They’re warm to each other, humanity among the inhumane.) They thought they were doing good. But at what cost?

That this simple wire-frame plotting, courtesy Zombieland and Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick exercising unusual restraint adapting a heady George Saunders short story, plays out so effectively is the work of director Joseph Kosinski. (A fluke of pandemic scheduling means the film he shot over three years ago, Top Gun: Maverick, is ruling the summer box office while this project, made mid-pandemic, is ready for release mere weeks later. What a time to demonstrate his range!) He gives the film a restrained style—as slick as the tunes echoing from the compound’s speakers—gliding along and pinned down in surveillance angles doubling or tripling the views from the control room. He lets his characters squirm, lab rats stuck in a maze, while we can pick out the whole picture well in advance. He’s expert at building out the architecture of a plot in conjunction with its setting, housing the emotional appeals in handsome surfaces. Think the vast digital loneliness of Tron Legacy, the windswept empty landscapes of Oblivion, the crackling Arizona wilds' fire dangers of Only the Brave, the high-velocity aerial combat and cozy homefront of Top Gun 2. Here it’s the deceptive comfort wrapped around total heartlessness, victims cooped up and slowly driven mad. It keys into our reflective understanding that the government will willingly abdicate its responsibilities to care for citizens it sees as disposable. If it can privatize prisons, why not emotions and biological urges, too? Here’s a fun little thriller that sees that obviously bad idea to its logical conclusion.

Cruise Control: TOP GUN: MAVERICK

The secret sauce of Top Gun’s appeal is that it’s hard and soft, mechanical and sentimental, gear-headed and soft-hearted. There’s militarism and macho posturing among students at a Naval flight academy, with as much attention to glistening bodies as the planes’ chassis. But it is balanced out with a cocky young pilot’s attempts at wooing a woman out of his range, and his wing-mate’s loving relationship with a doting wife and son. Sure, a mysterious Other is out there, and the military needs to train these men to fight it. But there’s the homeland to be tended in the meantime, too. Tony Scott made this movie of fast planes and smirking retorts drip with montage and soft rock, an extended advertisement for itself. But the sneaky romantic core is surely what made it popular. And embracing that is what makes the long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick even better. This time around, director Joseph Kosinski—whose great resume is a perfect preparation for the task, with a belated and much-improved sequel to an 80s favorite, Tron: Legacy; a Tom Cruise action spectacle, Oblivion; and a men-at-dangerous-work, process-oriented tearjerker Only the Brave—precisely calibrates the requirements and delivers a movie that’s muscular, delicate, and relentlessly, manipulatively satisfying.

The 36-year gap between the original and this sequel has necessitate a more mature approach. I’m glad they didn’t try to claim Cruise’s hotshot pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is still a youthful paragon of gleaming, arrogant precociousness. That was the typical Cruise role at the beginning of his stardom, but Maverick finds him willing to admit to his age. Much like the Mission: Impossibles’ later entries really took off once Cruise was willing to make his hero small in the frame, a perpetual underdog just scraping by in, well, impossible tasks, this sequel finds Maverick at the other end of a long career. We hear that, after graduating Top Gun, he served overseas multiple times, and is now working as a test pilot for experimental planes. He also still bristles at authority, which means he remains a Captain after all these years. He knows he needs to placate the brass (Ed Harris, Jon Hamm) just enough to keep him in the cockpit of really cool, really fast planes. But he’s also enough of a hotshot to want to push the limits wherever he can. This brings him back to Top Gun as an instructor, a punishment, perhaps, for one more clash with a direct order, or salvation, perhaps, on the part of an old friend (Val Kilmer) who sticks up for him one more time. Is there still room for a hero like Maverick, in a program for a kind of air combat that’s less a pressing issue in a world of drones and insurgencies? And does he have what it takes, not merely to prove himself, but to prepare the best-of-the-best for a dangerous mission that’d be certain suicide if they can’t master his techniques?

This allows for a movie that’s a more relaxed and gentle story about fathers and mentors and hoping to make up for old mistakes and prove one’s relevance to a new generation. (The movie’s definitely self-aware there.) The youthful energy of the first picture is now off to the sides, and centered on others. Throughout it leans on Cruise’s age by letting him play something like a normal person instead of a gleaming hero. He’s surrounded by younger trainees, including one (Miles Teller) who is the son of a fallen character from the original. This complicates the emotional valances of the training. Cruise wants to help these students survive by teaching them to pull off nearly-impossible maneuvers—tight, vertiginous dives and steep, face-melting climbs. But his understanding of the costs of this job, and this mission, makes him reluctant to put them in danger at all. He feels like he owes it to his late friend’s son. But here’s a movie about making things right from your past, and finding people to help along the way. It’s most expressive in the warm middle-aged romance on the margins, as Maverick reconnects with an old fling, an admiral’s daughter who is now a glowing, bar-owning, single mother (Jennifer Connelly). This is just one more way the movie sets up cliche and diverges into unexpected heart. What in the previous film would be a quick flirt is now a slow smolder, and where the lovemaking montage should be is instead a montage of small talk. How sweet. Later, as he sneaks out, the woman’s teen daughter stares down the old man and, right when you think she’d snark, instead says, “Don’t break her heart again.”

Because the movie so genuinely believes in the emotions of these cardboard types, it sells the stakes. It builds setups and pays them off with aplomb. The training sequences, shot in convincing aerial stunts, are a beguiling mechanical spectacle. And even if the ultimate mission is geopolitically preposterous, it’s still a gripping and tense spectacle of planes and missiles for an extended action climax. It comes down to a militaristic fantasy of faceless bad guys from a nameless country to whom consequence-free violence can be committed without larger global complications. (This is the way it has to be for our global film marketplace, but recall the original was similarly cagey; they both have all the specificity of a recruitment ad.) But because the picture is so elegantly manipulative, with its gooey warm sentiment powering the interpersonal dynamics, and the hard-charging dogfights and explosions of the finale so muscularly deployed and crisply cut, that it’s hard not to get swept up in its concussive artifice. All that and a soaring power-ballad pounding over the end credits, too? That’s the perfect combination of hard and soft for which you go to a movie like this.

Pretty/Boring: OBLIVION

There’s a certain baseline amount of pleasure that can be found in watching a film from a director with the imagination to design striking shots and the knowledge of how to move the camera in interesting ways. Director Joseph Kosinski is just such a director. He doesn’t just think in shots; he thinks in sequences. There’s an architectural sleekness to the way he devises cinematic imagery. This is especially true of his debut film, 2010’s Tron: Legacy, a film that in some hands might’ve played as hopelessly retro fan service, but was instead enlivened by a sense of popcorn poetry in the pounding Daft Punk score and the crisp electric neon cool of each and every frame. It’s perhaps the most underappreciated directorial debut in recent memory, simply for the way he smuggled artistry into a big budget behemoth of a film. I wish I could say the same for his follow up effort, Oblivion. It’s also a sci-fi film with lots of surface cool, but, unlike the Tron sequel, that’s where it stops. This is a film that can’t quite coast on surface charms alone. There’s just not enough there there.

It starts promisingly enough with a tantalizing set up. Many decades into the future, many years after an alien race blew up the moon and invaded Earth before getting nuked by humans in return, two humans (Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough) patrol the decimated planet. They’re waiting for their mission’s expiration date, at which point they can leave the irradiated wasteland behind and join the human colony that’s been forming on a moon elsewhere in the solar system. The two workers sit in a glass apartment in the sky, the woman overseeing day-to-day operations, the man flying a transparent bubble on wings out into the field to repair heavily armed drones. Their commander (Melissa Leo) checks in with them each morning, beaming her image onto their computer screens from her station in a massive triangular satellite high above them, orbiting outside the atmosphere. This is all slick stuff imbued with great mystery, but it soon becomes clear that the more that is found out, the less there’s reason to care.

Kosinski’s too good to make a movie that looks bad. Appropriately, Oblivion has gleaming technology and effects situated effortlessly in gorgeous shots of craggy windswept landscapes dotted with buried landmarks of humans past. But pretty sights can’t cover up a plot that starts moderately intriguing and then quickly grows inert before twisting itself around to routine genre muddling. It’s a film of portentous signifiers without anything signified, empty symbols chasing narrative cliché. You’d think in this day and age a movie about humans repairing largely autonomous drones without a clear memory of why they’re doing it could get more resonance that this film manages.

The script by Kosinski with Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt is a thin, familiar sci-fi narrative in which Things Are Not As They Seem. Cruise, for this is nothing if not a Tom Cruise picture, is the one who slowly solves the mystery. He dreams of a mysterious woman (Olga Kurylenko) and is wary of scavengers that catch and pick apart the drones. Eventually, he’ll meet a few of them, leading to Morgan Freeman having a great entrance, intoning poetry from the shadows before lighting a match that illuminates his face. But instead of deepening the mystery, it is simply prolonged. Each new character and each new bit of information in this would-be mindbender reveals how little is actually on the film’s mind. At one point Riseborough, responding to Cruise’s increasingly questioning demeanor, says, “We’re not supposed to remember, remember?”

Ah, but Cruise wants to remember. Like WALL-E, he’s collecting scraps of junk and little treasures, fascinated by the life humans left behind. It’s this hoarding curiosity that leads him to gather scraps of clues and divine their true purpose. Similarly, an audience with any knowledge of sci-fi films, both junk and treasures, of years past will be able to figure out the film’s every move. Maybe you’ve seen WALL-E, Silent Running or Planet of the Apes and maybe even its first sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Maybe you’ve watched the massive classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and the recent indie Moon. Drawing bits and pieces from these films and many more, Kosinski and his collaborators make a beautiful emptiness that combines old themes in new ways that ring hollow, leaving so little to grab onto that it grows boring well before the credits roll, each new development registering with me with a thud and a shrug instead of the intended jolt and surprise. 

Gods Inside a Machine: TRON: LEGACY

Tron: Legacy is my inner 12-year-old’s favorite movie of the year. It’s a slick, entertaining film, though in some ways a standard, solemn blockbuster. It’s also a rather stunning directorial debut for Joseph Kosinski, who manages to find some moments of visual poetry amidst the sleek, glow-in-the-dark sci-fi aesthetic. The first Tron, directed by Steven Lisberger, flopped upon its release in 1982. It has a fascinating concept but is unsure how far to push its garish kookiness, telling the story of a talented computer programmer (Jeff Bridges) who is sucked into the computer world he helped create for the shady technology company Encom. Built from once cutting-edge computer technology, the effects are no longer special. Indeed, they are now an impediment, but no more so than the collision between the real-world corporate espionage plot and the ugly computer world visuals.

With this late sequel, Kosinski makes the concept as cool as it should have been in the first place. He, along with former Lost writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, bring back Jeff Bridges for a film that stands alone, working better than its sequel status. In a prologue we learn that, though Bridges emerged from the computer to become a success in our world, he eventually disappeared, orphaning his young son (Owen Best). This son grows up to be a successful programmer in his own right, and by the time the story proper begins, he wants nothing to do with the company his dad helped create.

Now played by the woodenly earnest Garrett Hedlund, he broods and scowls. Not even pulling a prank on Encom’s Board of Directors brings a smile to his face. Soon enough, he receives a mysterious signal from his dad’s old office and shows up to investigate. Once there, no big surprise, he accidentally ends up inside the computer as well. There he must battle his way out of a gladiator lightshow complete with the Machiavellian maneuverings of programs that have rebelled against the user (also their creator), thus keeping Bridges trapped and exiled for all this time, powerless against the ageless program he made in his own image.

The film is driven forward by its marriage of sleek visuals to an insistent, driving Daft Punk score (a great piece of film scoring). Tron: Legacy is exciting, even in its moments of stasis and vagueness (most likely symptoms of Disney’s attempt to turn Tron into their next big franchise). This is a film of poses and moments, and I found both aspects equally striking. An early moment takes us from a grieving young boy’s bike ride to the angst-filled motorcyclist he becomes, spanning two decades of character development in one elegant cut. Criss-crossing neon beams of energy dot the 3D computer-world landscape, with its towering future-noir buildings and its arenas and highways that serve as stages for glowing spectacle. Later, Bridges will make a dramatic entrance into a tense situation backlit like an electric Jedi. The film is a fluid, shimmering sci-fi sensation, drawing from aesthetic influences like the Star Wars prequels, the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer and Matrix sequels, the blockbuster fussiness of David Fincher’s more fantastical films, and the somberness of Christopher Nolan’s Batmans.

The leads’ acting is merely functional (yes, even from the dependable Bridges), but the supporting performances are nicely honed pieces of genre work. An early cameo from Cillian Murphy is the most promising of the film’s attempts at sequel setting. Bruce Boxleitner lends some weight to the first-act exposition, reprising his role from the first film. Olivia Wilde struts about in a striking black suit that really pops against her artificial paleness. Michael Sheen brings the only comedy as he strokes a glowing cane and snaps off his snippy dialogue while strutting through his role as a campy nightclub owner. It’s all good fun.

Though hardly revelatory, Tron: Legacy is a refreshing event film that promises no more than it can deliver. It’s an eye-candy spectacle with top-of-the-line effects that manage arresting visuals and an addictive tone amidst the action. The film finds a sleek, cool groove in which to operate. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself so drawn into the pleasing charge of the imagery and sounds, and that my inner 12-year-old was so delighted.