Review of the film "Race"
Mid 70's. In Formula 1 racing, two irreconcilable rivals came together - Briton James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl). For a long time, their competition on the race tracks was tough, but it was only in 1976 that fate decreed that both drivers had equal cars. In equal conditions, to win, you need to show new character traits. Once the race has started, there is no turning back. There will only be one winner.
Still from the movie "Race"
Filming was carried out both on active racing tracks and on tracks “made up” to look like racing tracks in the mid-seventies
There was a real lack of real Formula 1 movies. There are, of course, classic films, and stories about American touring car racing, even a very close to the formula, but more fantasized “Racer” with Stallone. But there was no real thoughtful movie about the “queen of motorsport.” Why? Obviously, because the formulaic world is extremely multifaceted - even the world championship is stretched over two dozen stages, and confrontations between drivers sometimes stretch for three to five years. At the same time, intrigues arise within the teams and between the “stables”.
Still from the movie "Race"
This is all incredibly interesting, full of amazing collisions, exciting confrontations and beautiful victories, but absolutely unfilmable. No spectator who is not involved in the intricacies of pit stop tactics, Grand Prix sequences or qualifying races will want to waste time in the cinema or in front of the TV on endless scoreboards, where the winner from the loser is separated by fractions of seconds.
Still from the movie "Race"
Ron Howard took a different path - he isolated one single personal confrontation from the entire history of auto racing. Moreover, in this confrontation, one season was isolated, and there were only two races in the season. Key, of course, but sharply narrowing the review. Therefore, the action breaks out of the closed ring of the race track and embraces the personal lives of the rivals.
Still from the movie "Race"
It must be said that Howard chose wonderful characters - the 70s were the heyday of Formula 1. The racers were much closer to rock stars or A-list actors than to athletes who spent their days and nights in gyms.
Still from the movie "Race"
Hunt personified a generation of pilots who lived in constant search of the line between speed and death. It is not surprising that this era was accompanied by many deaths - the madmen were as unstoppable as they were fragile. Lauda, on the contrary, became the harbinger of the academic approach to racing, which was then continued by Alain Prost and Mika Hakkinen. It was Lauda who opposed passion to cold calculation.
Still from the movie "Race"
Original cars from Formula 1 teams and working copies of cars from those years were used for filming.
The picture is based on this confrontation - a playboy and a rake, changing women like gloves, living every day as if it were his last and ready at any moment to take on a challenge, James Hunt versus the calculating, pedantic, cold Niki Lauda, who prefers stability both in his personal life and in racing struggle. Fate gives both of them the opportunity to look at themselves from the outside - Howard twists the characters of Hemsworth and Brühl in such a way that the viewer until the very end cannot decide which character to worry about. And in this the picture is reminiscent of a racing race itself - the leader changes from lap to lap, but each pilot retains a chance to win until the very finish flag.
Director Ron Howard's career has included many films that set him apart from other directors. This is Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and Frost vs. Nixon. Is “Race” worthy to stand in this row? Perhaps yes. The film has an inner nerve, there are brilliant characters, there are tough questions and equally tough answers to them. Finally, there is the incredible beauty of the racing scenes - not only did the cars in those days really look like some kind of bundle of energy that came from another world, but the races themselves were also incredibly “tasty” shown. It’s even a little unfortunate that since Lauda’s terrible accident, since the deaths of Gilles Villeneuve and Ayrton Senna, “Formula” has cleaned up its hair so much that even leaving the track is considered today almost a phenomenal event. "Race" including a film about how the Road Gods began their journey down to Earth. They are still gods, but their wings have been severely clipped. Whether it’s right or wrong is up to the viewer to decide. The race ends, but the race continues.
