F9 Fact Check How Realistic Is The New Fast & Furious Movie

F9 Fact Check: How Realistic Is The New Fast & Furious Movie?

Contents

F9 features landmines, giant electromagnets, and Ludacris launching off into space, but there’s real science behind the Fast and Furious franchise.

You Are Reading :[thien_display_title]

F9 Fact Check How Realistic Is The New Fast & Furious Movie

F9 pushes realism in the Fast and Furious franchise to the limit, delivering awe-inspiring stunts that defy both gravity and logic. In the latest entry in The Fast Saga, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) gathers his crew again for another ridiculous ride. Though he hasn’t been mentioned before, Jakob Toretto (John Cena), a dangerous spy and Dom’s brother, comes from out of the shadows to be the main foe in the film. Jakob plans to steal a device that could allow him to hold the world’s weapons systems hostage, and Dom is the only one who can take him down. But in order to do so, the older Toretto needs to face his past and deliver some signature Fast and Furious stunts.

The Fast and Furious franchise is known for upping the stakes in each film. In the first movie, the crew was simply stealing DVD players and electronics equipment. By the eighth movie, Dom and his gang were fighting a nuclear submarine. Fast & Furious 6 featured a seemingly endless Fast & Furious runway for car stunts and an exploding plane, Furious 7 had cars jumping through skyscrapers, and The Fate of the Furious forced Dom to go airborne, clearing the aforementioned submarine to avoid a heat-seeking missile. It’s exciting, incredible, and increasingly implausible.

Like the previous films in the franchise, F9 takes stunts to a new level. Cars drive over landmines, Dom swings his vehicle across a chasm on bridge cables, and the crew finally blasts off into outer space. But just how realistic are the stunts in the film? Costas Efthimiou, a physics professor at the University of Central Florida, took a look at the stunts in F9 for Screen Rant. In addition to using movies to teach his students about physics, Professor Efthimiou has also published a widely circulated scholarly article on the science behind Dwayne Johnson’s viral jump in Skyscraper (via ArXiv.org), finding it plausible. Though he didn’t see the movie by press time, the professor was able to analyze the stunts through various F9 trailers and footage released online, determining just how realistic they actually are.

Can F9’s Cars Drive Over Landmines?

F9 Fact Check How Realistic Is The New Fast & Furious Movie

Early on in F9, Dom and his crew are forced to drive through a minefield, much to the chagrin of Tyrese Gibson’s Roman Pearce, who learns that a sign saying “Peligro Minas” means “Danger Mines.” Ludacris’ Tej Parker reasons that the cars can safely cross the mines by going 80 miles per hour. Unfortunately, Roman’s speedometer only goes up to 70 miles per hour. Though he still makes it out alive, Roman eloquently states along the way, “My ass is en fuego.”

According to Tej, a delay on the landmines in F9 is enough for the crew to get through, but the stunt wouldn’t work so well with modern mines. Professor Efthimiou says the delay on modern mines is almost nonexistent. Going 80 miles per hour is equivalent to around 36 meters per second. If a mine’s delay is just milliseconds, things wouldn’t work out well for the driver. “If we assume there’s only five milliseconds for the mine to detonate, the wheel has moved inches,” Efthimiou said.

See also  Reservoir Dogs Did Steve Buscemis Mr Pink Survive The Movie

However, if the mines did actually have a delay, it would be more plausible. Even just a third of a second for a delay would allow the vehicle to move around 12 meters away from the blast. While F9 introduces many confusing issues to the Fast & Furious timeline, this is one area where the film’s logic sort of works. Still, Efthimiou notes that if it were reasonable to drive over mines and detonate them safely, the military would already be doing it. “If that was possible, we would be able to de-mine fields very easily,” Professor Efthimiou said. “The army would know about that.”

Could A Car Clear A Chasm Like Vin Diesel’s In F9?

F9 Fact Check How Realistic Is The New Fast & Furious Movie

One of the first major stunts in F9 consists of Dom Toretto hooking his car on a cable of a broken bridge and swinging across a chasm to avoid a helicopter assault. Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is in the passenger seat for the jump, offering a halfhearted, “No, no, no, Dom,” as a rebuttal. Of course, the car swings across the chasm with ease, rolling and flipping to safety. It’s a classic, over-the-top Fast and Furious scene for fans. “Well, that was new,” Letty quips.

Professor Efthimiou was able to view the parts of the scene previously released online and he immediately noticed some problems. It’s unclear how Dom manages to hook the cable on the car so it stays secure when it’s pulled taut. Also, if the cable separated from the ground easily on one side of the bridge, it would probably separate easily on the other when it stops the descent of the car. If those factors are ignored and only the information presented is taken into account, the professor said he “cannot claim that it is not possible.”

Among the calculations, Professor Efthimiou looked at the vertical force exerted on Dom and Letty when the cable gets pulled taut, saying he “cannot claim that the bones are necessarily crushed.” He did the same calculation for the car’s collision with the cliff on the other side. The professor also calculated the force on the cable at the bottom of the descent and said it seems it doesn’t exceed the cable’s elastic limit (assuming that the cable is 6 cm in diameter and made of steel). More information presented in the Fast & Furious movie, such as showing a better shot of the full distance of the chasm, could obviously affect the calculations. However, Efthimiou concludes, “As unrealistic as this scene is, my back-of-the-envelope calculations do not allow me to claim big problems.”

Can F9’s Magnets Smash Cars Through Buildings?

F9 Fact Check How Realistic Is The New Fast & Furious Movie

Though Dom’s long-lost brother, Jakob, joins the cast of F9, the real new members of the crew are the electromagnets. Throughout the movie, Dom’s Fast and Furious family utilizes magnets to fight off assailants or simply mess around with each other. The magnets are so abnormally strong that a car is plucked out of the air by a plane, trucks are repelled across roads, and enemy vehicles are flipped over at will. In one confounding scene, a car is even sent through a building and straight into the side of a magnet-toting truck.

See also  The Umbrella Academy 10 Things Only Comic Fans Know About Luther

Some issues are apparent here as well. According to the professor, Dom’s crew can’t control F9’s car magnets like this. In terms of sucking a car through a building, a magnet that powerful would also attract everything else that’s magnetic, too. This includes other cars, metal objects, and building materials. Though the movie does show the magnet attracting other metals at various points, Dom’s crew wouldn’t be able to pick a single car off the road on the other side of a building. The behavior of the magnets also doesn’t make total sense. “If you apply a force on an object, the other object applies the exact opposite force, so both of them are going to move towards each other,” Efthimiou explained. “Because the truck they drive is not secured to anything, we should also see them move sideways.”

Can F9’s Car Really Fly Into Space?

Director Justin Lin claims he consulted NASA scientists about F9’s rocket car trip to space. According to the director, it’s “logistically, scientifically” one of the most plausible set pieces in the film. In the infamous scene from F9, Tej and Roman drop off of a plane and fly a modified, rocket-powered Pontiac Fiero into outer space. Once they’re there, they locate the exact satellite they were looking for and smash through it to save the world. It’s all in a day’s work.

However, Professor Efthimiou has some quibbles. “I don’t think that that’s actually possible,” he said about the Fast and Furious rocket car. Unlike cars, rockets are specifically made to fly, and they require a massive amount of fuel to do so. Tej and Roman’s space flight might not have the fuel necessary for the car to get enough speed to make it out of the atmosphere. “If I needed so much effort and so much design for a real rocket, imagine what would happen in the case of a car. It’s impossible,” he said, noting it takes companies like SpaceX years to develop rockets to go into space. He added, “It’s not that simple to take my car and say, ‘OK, let’s put two boosters there.'”

Even if the car had the fuel and could reach speeds capable of flight, there are countless other issues. The friction from the air could cause it to explode, and rockets require complex computer equipment for precise movements. Space vehicles need highly trained personnel, not actor Tyrese Gibson and rapper Ludacris. “I cannot take a driver and let him fly a space rocket,” Efthimiou said. In the timeline of implausible things the Fast and Furious franchise has put on screen, F9’s rocket car stunt might be the most unrealistic.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/f9-movie-realistic-real-world-science/

Movies -