Top Gun Maverick, released after a long pandemic delay in the summer of 2022, was pretty clearly the most creatively successful action-adventure movie of the decade. It was amazingly shot, rendered, and paced, featuring a performance by Tom Cruise in which it mattered that the actor and character were starting to get up there in years. Some questioned going in whether it was worth it to update the original Top Gun after more than 30 years, but nobody did once they saw the movie.

Now, the behind-the-scenes team behind Maverick — director Joseph Kosinski, screenwriter Ehren Kruger, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer — has reunited with F1 The Movie, this time employing a different 60-ish leading man, Brad Pitt, in place of Cruise, his Interview With the Vampire co-star.

It’s a super-exciting, well-rendered film, set on the culturally ascendent Formula One racing circuit, and starring Pitt in the sort of role Paul Newman used to play- an aging hotshot who’s still very handsome, yet he’s still past 60, and it matters that he’s past 60. It’s amusing how Pitt, in Moneyball, played a guy who was already in the front office after he had long since washed out of his playing career- and now, 14 years later, Pitt is once again playing an active professional athlete.

Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a veteran auto racer who, decades earlier, had his career derailed by a bad accident, which is a trauma plot that tends to repeat itself in most racing movies. Now living a Jack Reacher-type lifestyle where he lives the Ford version of a VW Bus, plays poker, and occasionally races for fun, he’s lured back to Formula 1 by Ruben (Javier Bardem), an old rival who now runs an also-ran team on the F1 circuit.

Sonny ends up in a rivalry with his teammate, young hotshot driver Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), a guy who’s talented but very much of a different generation; the relationship between the two is different from most of its kind in sports movies. I thought I was expecting one ending to happen, until I remembered that that was the ending of the first Cars movie. (Most of the other competitors are played by real drivers and teams, although they don’t emerge as characters beyond the cameo stage.)

Also on hand is the team’s technical director (Kerry Condon), whose chemistry with Pitt is apparent the first time they’re in the same room, even if I understand objections some have raised in the film turning a pioneering technical director into a love interest.

Pitt is just fantastic here, in another role (after his Oscar-winning turn in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and later in Babylon) that shows he’s handling the transition into older age quite capably.

Yes, the whole thing is something of a commercial for the F1 circuit, which in recent years has become super-popular in the U.S., in part thanks to the Netflix series Drive to Survive. While NASCAR is associated in the public imagination with redneck culture, Formula One has managed to gain more upmarket popularity in the U.S. It’s also led to a series of prestige movies set in the circuit or other aspects of European auto racing- the documentaries about Aryton Senna and Michael Schumacher, and the auteur-directed feature films Rush, Ford v. Ferrari, Ferrari, and now F1 The Movie itself.

In addition to fantastic action, the film is also clearly attuned to the politics and business specificies of Formula One. And the attention to detail is spot-on as well, especially the way that in every flashback to the ‘80s or early ‘90s, all of the sponsors are Camel and other cigarettes, the kind of stuff very much not allowed today.

I admit that I’ve barely ever watched Formula One, don’t know this world or the rules of the races very well, and I might have nitpicked a bit more if I did; my FI-obsessed nephew noticed some factual inaccuraces. But I was awed by the package the film put together, and it made me want to get into the sport in a way none of the previous movies have done before.

F1 The Movie hits theaters this week, with Apple TV+ on board as well, as a co-producer and for later streaming.