Senna is a documentary focusing on the life of Ayrton Senna, a Formula 1 race car driver from Brazil who started in Go Kart racing and rose to F1's greatest heights in terms of his championships and the lows regarding the politics.
Senna is simply great filmmaking full stop, director Asif Kapadia succeeds where so many movies documentary or otherwise based on a real life person and/or events fail to do and that is give the viewer a sense of who the man really is and that we learn about that man as we watch the film, not 5 minutes after we finish watching and look up that person on the internet, no Kapadia doesn't make that mistake instead he uses purely archival footage to tell his tale and it is a masterstroke for it immediately gives the viewer the sense of the time and the place in which he lived and drove on the circuit.
Nothing however can prepare you for the final 20 minutes of the film, it is simply heartbreaking stuff, I won't say too much more if you haven't seen the film yet but if you already know of Senna's final fate then it won't be a surprise to the end but still it is heartbreaking and heart stopping stuff.
But I feel that the main reason I like this film so much is this, to me this gets right what so many action films get wrong and that is it gives you a complex hero, a snivelling villain, the bond that defines them and the arena in which they will face off against each other and where one has to beat the other and its done with real life figures that can't be thought up on the page and in a documentary of all things.
All in all, this is straight up one of the year's finest films, exhilarating, exciting and simply fantastic filmmaking, even if you are not an F1 fan and I know only a tiny bit about the sport its still highly recommended viewing, what an absolute joke that its lost its chance at the Oscars to compete for best documentary as it deserved a shot at the title, 4 out of 5.
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