After years of fans crossing their fingers in the hopes it would happen, the ninth installment in the Fast & Furious franchise finally gave the people what they wanted by sending Roman Pearce and Tej into outer space. Director Justin Lin said he spoke to the good people of NASA before putting the sequence together, and he may well have been laughed out of the room.
Scientific accuracy was never going to be a concern when you’re talking about a Pontiac Fiero being piloted by two dudes in scuba suits held together by duct tape using the accelerator to drive a car through a satellite, blowing it to smithereens without a single scratch to their own vehicle; even though anything orbiting our planet tends to move at around 17,000 miles per hour, meaning the Pontiac would technically need to be traveling much faster than that to cause damage without sustaining any itself.
Obviously, nobody cared because it was awesome and fan service on the most preposterous scale imaginable, but we’re now hearing from our sources – the same ones who told us Han would be back from the dead in F9 long before it was confirmed – that the crew could be heading for a second trip beyond the stars at some point during the concluding tenth and eleventh chapters.
Hobbs & Shaw introduced sci-fi elements into the mix via Idris Elba’s cybernetically-enhanced Brixton, and the family has now been to space. So f*ck it, let’s hope we see a villain with a secret lair on the moon or something suitably ridiculous, because Fast & Furious is running out of ways to keep upping the ante on our planet.
