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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

After seeing a somewhat of a racing movie called American Graffiti starring Ron Howard, the next movie to watch was an obvious choice. A directed by Ron Howard 2013 racing film called Rush, which might feel like a predecessor of 2025's Joseph Kosinski film F1. But watching it I found this movie to be closer to Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street rather than F1.

The film goes a million miles an hour. So much so that the film doesn't have any time to show any actual racing. At one point you have such a compression of time during one Grand Prix that an on screen text is telling you who won and who lost, instead of the picture of the film.

That is because this film is trying to compress a lot of time and a lot of nuanced relationship dynamics into one 2 hour long presentation. This movie, unlike F1, is a dramatization of a true story: the rivalry between two F1 world champions Niki Lauda ( Daniel Brühl ) and James Hunt ( Chris Hemsworth ) which lead to a disaster, that gave Niki Lauda his iconic status. Long story short, in a huge crash, he burned half of his face, and then came back to the track as a race-driver later during the same Grand Prix. That is some legendary pare of balls there.

I wont say that the movie doesn't work. It works spectacularly. It's just there is a lot of good iconic races in this film and you see maybe at best a few minutes of each. But then again, if Ron Howard wanted to direct the races even as short as the races in F1, he would need to make this movie be like... I don't know... 10 hours long.

This is why I think this movie feels like The Wolf of Wall Street. Similarly to that film Rush is moving from one scene to another in an insane pace just to cover the story in a feature film length of time. So you feel like you are watching something of the The Wolf kind here.

Both Brühl and Hemsworth are stupidly good. They kind of hate each other but they kind of love each other. Or more like Hunt is secretly in love with Lauda, while Lauda is very respectful of Hunt, just because Hunt is a great enemy for him to have on the track. Both of them are so good at racing that they drive each other nuts while racing. And then after racing they have an almost bromance type situation. You know with drama and yelling at each other and stuff.

I liked the visuals in this film. Some of it is obviously CGI ( not a lot of it ) but the color grading / the way Howard shoots everything is so precisely calculated that the CGI stuff blends in perfectly without making things feel wrong. This movie holds up better than anything done today, and it was made 12 years ago. But to be frank, Howard is the kind of guy who knows how to get the shots he needs in a best way possible to have them hold up forever. In Apollo 13 he used a plane that dives really fast to achieve the weightlessness of space. Like this guy knows what he is doing. So of course this movie holds up better than anything done today. Come on!

Happy Hacking!!!


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