Fast Change: A Furious Reinvention of Cinema

 

2001: the year the first Fast and the Furious was released. 22 years later and the franchise is still going strong. If you ask me, what keeps this franchise going is not only the love from fans but also the new blood they keep adding along the way. Take Fast X for example. The introductions of Brie Larson and Jason Momoa bring new energy to the franchise. Jason and Brie have their fanbases already from playing Captain Marvel and Aquaman, but their fanbases have grown after joining this pop culture juggernaut. Cinema is forever changing and different franchises are being born that add something new to the world of cinema. Kambole Campbell wrote a great article that really illustrates how Fast and the Furious is changing cinema even 22 years later. In the article, they state, "Back then, in 2001, studios put a lot more stock in mid-budget action and heist movies, think Ocean's 11, A Knight's Tale, and Training Day, to pick a few popular contemporaries. These were films that relied on real, tangible action instead of visual effects and weren't invested in what we now call "universe building" – teeing themselves up for a web of future sequels and potential crossovers. At the same time, with the new Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises kicking off that year, and the first X-Men film being released the year before, major change within the Hollywood ecosystem was on the horizon"¹. 2001 was the year when things changed for cinema and more times than not, that meant bringing in new mediums of entertainment and new concepts for movies that fans regardless of age could enjoy. While the Fast saga at the beginning was mainly about the beautiful girls and very expensive cars, the true meat and potatoes of the franchise soon became "Familia" or Family. 

The article further states, "As the 2000s went on, the series continued shifting gears to accommodate changing audience tastes and compete with new blockbuster rivals. In 2008, the first Marvel movie, Iron Man, was released, and so began a new age of superhero movies defined by two things: their computer-generated effects and their intricate intermingling of characters and plotlines within a "shared universe". At the same time, though, the Fast and Furious franchise was evolving in parallel. Indeed, 2009's Fast & Furious, the fourth film in the series, and Justin Lin's second as director brought together disparate characters from different installments, three years before The Avengers did a similar thing with Marvel superheroes. It was also, unfortunately, an ugly and self-serious mess, though it at least laid the groundwork for Lin's 2011 follow-up Fast Five, a turning point for the franchise – and the moment when its current mega-popularity began to flourish"². In other words, franchises have changed how we look at cinema and that will probably be how we look at films moving forward. One thing that Marvel gets that the Fast franchise deals with too is fatigue. MCU films have felt stuffy the same with these films because fans want something different and franchise films while fun and entertaining can feel stuffy when so many of them come out around the same time. 

Another plot point that Fast and Furious films deal with that other franchises deal with is abandoning reality for the sake of driving the plot along. A good example is the death of Han in Fast and Furious. If you have seen the films then you know that he "dies" after being driven off the road by Jason Statham's Deckard Shaw and then the car explodes killing Han. What makes that plot point stupid is the fact that Han's death is retconned a few movies later to show that Han faked his death to go into hiding thanks to Kurt Russell's Mr. Nobody and that the fatal car wreck was merely a hologram. 

The website The Ringer does a great job of highlighting how that relates to what you see currently in the MCU. As the article states, "Take, for instance, the arc of the beloved Han Lue (spoiler alert, if you care about that kind of thing). One of the great emotional benchmarks for the series was his death in Tokyo Drift, but Lin and Co. had no issues reversing that tragedy to bring him back for F9. When it first occurred, his death was not exactly ambiguous: He got stuck in an overturned car that then exploded. There was a funeral. So how did he come back to life? That’s a trick question because, as we learn in F9, the scene of his death was merely a hologram all along—and not one that’s even discussed in all that much detail. If this sounds stupid, that’s because it is. But it’s also a great relief to people who already accept the inherent bullshit of movies; when we go to the cinema, we are in a sandbox where anything can happen, where every wildest idea available can be manifested just because it’s fun. The Fast & Furious franchise is the movie universe that understands this and doesn’t bother tediously explaining the dream world that we all already know the (ultimately nonexistent) rules of. In recent days, thousands on Twitter have replied to a viral prompt wondering exactly when the movies “abandoned reality,” but the truth is there’s no wrong answer; the real value of that discourse is in the collective memory of just how far beyond believability the movies have gone. The only real law in the series is that if it’s delightful, you don’t have to bother making up excuses for it—just light the wick, and watch the fireworks go. For contrast’s sake, consider how the MCU goes about portraying its more cockamamie moments. In Avengers: Endgame, a byzantine sequence of time-travel missions is required to bring half of all living things back to life. Unlike Lin, though, directors Joe and Anthony Russo do not consider this absurd predicament too silly to fully diagram. Instead, the movie features several long-winded sequences that, in a fashion reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s terminally sci-fi-wiki-pilled Inception, try to make this all reasonable and rational. In a movie with a big green monster in glasses, a man the size of a bug, and the most handsome virgin alive, it is important to its authors, it seems, that we should not let things get inexplicable. That might be too sublime."³ What you see is that movies have a way to mess with the viewer's perception of reality in a way that often times instead of making the viewer seem knowledgeable it makes them look like an idiot. 

The article further goes on to talk about how Vin Diesel sees Dom and his crew dealing with a final boss in the last two Fast movies who deals with a very real threat even in today's climate: artificial intelligence. The article states, "Mockable as it all is, there is sufficient weight to the movies’ warm retro core, to the soft heart of their thematic through lines. Family values are, of course, deeply important in this world, but so is the endless battle of new versus old, fake versus real, and digital versus analog. Diesel was explicit about this when asked about what lies beyond Fast X. He described a final boss for the series who tries to control humanity through artificial intelligence. “There is somebody that believes that’s the future,” Diesel said, “and that’s at direct odds with the Toretto mentality.”⁴ Let's talk about that. The Fast franchise has many forms but dealing with artificial intelligence brings a real threat to a film saga that at its core felt like Point Break with cars. The Fast franchise is changing with the times, what was cool when the franchise started is not cool 22 years later. One thing that the Fast saga prides itself on is representation.

As the article for The Ringer states, "Justin Lin is essential to the franchise’s evolution into its signature style and tone. Lin entered the series with The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which was also the beginning of these movies’ persistent international flair. He went on to direct Fast & Furious (Mexico), Fast Five (Brazil), Fast & Furious 6 (England), and F9 (lots of places). As the movies traveled the world, their ballooning cast became the most diverse of any big-scale franchise—but without any of the typical, tawdry self-congratulations that the industry tends toward whenever it spotlights so many non-white performers. New York Times critic (and frequent Ringer collaborator) Wesley Morris, then of the Boston Globe, won a Pulitzer in 2012 in large part for eloquently pointing this out: “Unlike most movies that feature actors of different races,” he wrote, “the mixing is neither superficial nor topical. It has been increasingly thorough as the series goes on—and mostly unacknowledged. That this should seem so strange, so rare, merely underscores how far Hollywood has drifted from the rest of culture.” Lin also guided the franchise’s departure from the self-seriousness of its beginning chapters. Drawing on the playful preposterousness of professional wrestling, the franchise cast Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and then Ronda Rousey, Roman Reigns, and John Cena. Collectively, their presence is a well-received wink to the audience communicating that the movies are an elaborate embrace of kayfabe, easily resettable plot dynamics, and joyful experiments in physics and the entropy of big personalities. The latter has spilled over into real life, where Johnson and Vin Diesel’s relationship seems nearly as contentious as it was when they first squared off on-screen in Rio. That meta-narrative adds even more juice to what’s already a rich tapestry of theatrical sassiness punctuated by some of the most deliciously corny lines you’ll ever hear. As the movies have grossed billions, true A1 screen stars—Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, Helen Mirren, Brie Larson, Jason Momoa, Rita Moreno—have eagerly signed up to rage against realism by driving their way through apocalyptic infrastructure chaos while saying stuff like “I’m the crocodile at the watering hole.” At the end of each chapter, you even get to join the inevitable multicultural family barbecue. And much as the representational multiplicity is mercifully free of sanctimonious exposition about its own meaning, so is the post-logical way in which events unfold."⁵ 

Representation in film matters and what often goes overlooked is the fact that without the representation over the years in the Fast and the Furious franchise, many of the other franchises would not be diverse and would look like the cast of Friends. 2001 was the time when things started looking up for diversity. 22 years later and while things have not always looked good in terms of cinematic diversity, film franchises are changing that. The Fast and Furious films set the table and now it is time for everyone else to eat. In other words, the Fast franchise set the foundation and now other films and other franchises can build off of what was started and created for them. That is the true beauty of cinema.

1. Campbell, K. (2022, February 24). F9: How the fast & furious films define the 21st Century. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210624-f9-and-how-the-fast-furious-films-define-the-21st-century 

2. Campbell, K. (2022, February 24). F9: How the fast & furious films define the 21st Century. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210624-f9-and-how-the-fast-furious-films-define-the-21st-century 

3. Campbell, K. (2022, February 24). F9: How the fast & furious films define the 21st Century. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210624-f9-and-how-the-fast-furious-films-define-the-21st-century 

4.Campbell, K. (2022, February 24). F9: How the fast & furious films define the 21st Century. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210624-f9-and-how-the-fast-furious-films-define-the-21st-century 

5.Campbell, K. (2022, February 24). F9: How the fast & furious films define the 21st Century. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210624-f9-and-how-the-fast-furious-films-define-the-21st-century