A Suggested New Sports Real
F1 (Joseph Kosinski, 2025) and Happy Gilmore 2 (Kyle Newacheck, 2025)
I initially misunderstood André Bazin’s idea of “Total Cinema” to be more enthusiastic; that it meant cinema’s totality-to-be-filled was not its developing failure to fully capture and represent reality, but the way it moved towards a total affectation of the senses, i.e. total immersion. I thought the “myth” of total cinema was that it could never fully immerse the viewer in its images and technologies, that was until I watched Joseph Kosinski’s F1 (2025) on reclinable seats at a deluxe movie theater.
In “The Myth of Total Cinema” Bazin (2005, 21) writes that each new development added to the cinema must bring it closer to its origins, its underlying essence and perceived power to bring together a total and perfect representation of reality. But besides some camera developments used to capture the POV of the cars, F1 by no means advances the technologies of cinema, its editing, formula and cinematography are basically a reiteration of Kosinski’s earlier sequel, Top Gun: Maverick (2021), transported to the race track. Where F1 really shines is in its rewriting of a recent and unimportant history.
This year’s Netflix produced legacy sequel Happy Gilmore 2 (Kyle Newacheck, 2025) is filled with cameos from professional golfers of the PGA, including the inspiration for Adam Sandler’s character, five time tour winner John Daly, playing himself as Happy’s alcohol-enabling roommate living in his garage. Most of the golfers seen in the film play themselves and as they are in their own careers: retired or active (including a mention and reiteration of Scottie Scheffer’s arrest in 2024). Happy Gilmore 2 follows the formula of the many legacy sequels to have come out in the last decade and follows Happy’s life as he battles alcoholism and the accidental killing of his wife, all while trying to get back on the course to win 300,000 dollars to pay for his daughter’s dance school tuition in Paris. All, of course, played out in the most exaggerated way.
The film pits the PGA golfers, seemingly considered boring by mainstream audiences, against the newer, surgically modified Maxi Golfers, part of a new and fast paced, mini golf inspired and comically evil league. The stakes of losing this tournament could mean the end of golf as we know it. Happy Gilmore 2’s plot clearly exceeds the limit of what would be possible in the sport, but the athletes play their part as if the looming doom of golf was real. Happy Gilmore 2 is a joke on the perceived notions of golf as a sport for the old, an outdated relic unfit for a fast paced media consuming world, so it creates its own reality of what could be.
F1, similarly to the Gilmore sequel, is filled with the sport’s best active athletes racing alongside Brad Pitt’s and Damson Idris’ characters, Sonny Hayes and Joshua Pierce respectively. Like Happy Gilmore 2, F1 follows the formula of an underdog sports film, but unlike its counterpart, it does not attempt to exaggerate the state of the sport, it rather tries to create an alternative version of its recent history and present by inserting the characters and their failing team APX GP into the already existing sport and media franchise, including the film’s villain mentioning their binging of Drive to Survive (2019-), Netflix’ docuseries sponsored by the FIA and meant to transform the sport into a dramatic reality TV show in order to broaden its market.
Sonny Hayes’ character is not simply a new driver, but someone who had been a part of the sport when it peaked in the late 1980s and 90s, racing alongside Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, so the film’s reimagining of history is seldom recent. Both Hayes and the younger Joshua Pierce race alongside the best: Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso are all featured in montages showing preparations for the races as well as in the many battles we see on the track. Unlike Happy Gilmore 2, F1 is not only based on something real, but it tries to be the real. Jerry Bruckheimer attempted the same in his earlier film Days of Thunder (1990), directed by Tony Scott and led by Tom Cruise, in which some of the racing scenes were shot during real races of the NASCAR season. Yet, in Bruckheimer’s earlier iteration drivers seemed to inhabit a world of their own, in which each car on the field was something newly written. History can be invented, but racing must always be real. It is hard to imagine that the announced sequel to Days of Thunder will not be titled F1: The NASCAR movie.
Similar to these aspects is Richard Loncraine’s Wimbledon (2004), in which famous American tennis player John McEnroe is relegated to act as the game’s commentator, making allusions to his anger towards line judges back in his day. Wimbledon then suggests not a rewriting of history, but an acknowledgment of it: the past may have been real, but the present is completely fabricated.
So while Bazin’s (2005, 21) idea of total cinema involves the complete representation of reality through the use of newer and newer technologies, F1 and Happy Gilmore 2 suggest a new real, not because of their use of CGI but because they insert themselves into an already existing media franchise, that if not understood, is at least recognized by the general public. While other films have tried to represent things similarly, F1’s difference is that it does not try to create a world of its own through the sport, but rather inhabit the already existing one without omitting any of its visual and broadcasting aspects. The commentary, its enactors and sponsors all remain the same while Brad Pitt’s and Javier Bardem’s faces are de-aged and superimposed on old TV broadcasts of the sport, adding context to the even more real present of the film. This is similar to J. Hoberman’s (2012, 9) description of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 2005) and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) as a being “[…] engaged in a particular form of naturalization by inscribing CGI into prehistory […]” In this context it makes sense that 61 year old Sonny Hayes is seen as a dinosaur by his younger teammate.
There is a scene earlier in the film in which the pit wall strategists command the statistics and time measurements of a lap to be brought up on their monitors and to subsequently appear on the corner of our screens. Throughout the film their voice over not only adds tension and context to the editing, but explains how the viewer should drive the car on screen, how fast they are going, the temperature of their tires and any and all errors committed. At times, it felt like I was watching, or playing, a video-game. The story is also not too different from what you’d expect to see on a Forza Horizon (Microsoft, 2012-2021) game: the development of one’s racing career to victory through the completion of races, challenges and the forming of relationships. F1 follows not a narrative, but a mediatic transformation in front of our eyes from F1: The Sport, to F1: The Media Franchise, to F1: The Game, all put together as F1: The Movie.
Its immersion is not dissimilar to the way in which the endless reboots and sequels of famous movie franchises inhabit an already existing universe which is familiar to us. But the familiarity of reality in this suggested new real does not come from our perception of the lived world, but rather through its consumption. My immersion in F1, beyond its incredible pacing, which reaches points in which as a viewer we feel as if we were flowing through the film as Hayes flies through the track, comes not from my previous engagement with the history of the sport, but with the role it plays in the already existing scope of media. Different than sports biopics like Moneyball (Bennet Miller, 2011), which also stars Brad Pitt, the suggested new real is not an interpretation of the past, but rather the recording of a new present. F1 is not based on a true story, it is the true story.
The underlying idea of film, according to Bazin (2005, 18), is invisible, it precedes “the industrial discovery which alone can open the way to its practical use.” The idea in F1, in its attempt to make the sport more real than it already is, equates itself to what lies behind cinema. My initial misunderstanding of Bazin’s myth comes to its total realization in my complete immersion in the film, and doubled by a call to think every time Sonny Hayes answers that his will to drive forever is “not about the money.” The film ends with an obvious question: “then what is it about?”
CITATIONS:
Bazin, André. “The Myth of Total Cinema” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005. pp. 17-22.
Hoberman, J. Film After Film. Verso, NY: New York, 2012.