Is anyone else as conflicted about the film?
As someone who has watched F1 from the age of six or seven, just as Prost was inheriting Lauda's crown and the ensuing Prost-Piquet-Mansell battles, latterly joined by the emerging and irresistible talent of Senna.
To have brought the story of arguably the best racing driver that has ever lived to the screen so effectively and in a way which invites people with little interest in the sport and absolutely no knowledge of Senna is remarkable. Of course it's easy to say that they couldn't have made it up so were in a good position to begin with, but that by no means guarantees success.
There is, however, something that bugs me, and I don't mean in a smart-alecky I could have done better way. The film goes a wee bit too far than it needed to provide the story with a definitive hero and villains. I'm not damning it with faint praise when I say that the movie excels at presenting history the way Senna saw it at the time it happened. But other documentaries have produced similar results and still been able to bring a certain degree of balance I kept feeling that there was another side to this story. Although there always is more than one side to any story, this time I knew and remembered that there was another point of view. One which could have been heard without diluting the main one. Why is the reconciliation between Ayrton and Alain left out of the film except in an enigmatic credit at the end about Prost being patron of the Senna foundation, which makes it sound like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. It is known though that Senna, as he had done throughout his career, quickly forgot about all the acrimony and the accusations and the politics as soon as the need to struggle and overcome an opponent. It has been remarked by almost everyone that worked with Ayrton that this was his way of coping and it was a very successful method. It by no means takes anything away from the man's supreme, raw talent and it would have been an illuminating thing to have revealed in more detail, expecially in relation to Prost. Understandably though, the film-makers decided not to risk undermining the tension that the story, in the manner that it has been presented, creates. For posterity tough, I feel that there was room for making the distinction between fierce rivalry and mortal enmity. Since it was a movie about Senna the man as much as the racing driver, don't both men deserve to have the story of their relationship as men as well as drivers told?
@Twitzkrieg - Glasgow's FOREMOST authority