F9: The Fast Saga features some of the franchise’s most ridiculous action sequences yet, including sending Tej and Roman into space, making cars fly with magnets, and outrunning landmines. That last feat happens in the first half of the film, when Dom Toretto and the crew come across an active minefield while being pursued by bad guys. But is it actually possible to outrun the explosion of a landmine, even in a fast car?
Obviously, logic and science have never been huge considerations for the Fast and Furious franchise, and that’s usually been to its overall benefit. Past films have seen people survive explosions, outrace tanks and airplanes, live through impossible falls, crash ambulances into military drones, and leap hypercars between skyscrapers. The series is fun specifically because it flirts with the impossible. That creativity and fantastical absurdity are a big part of why the Fast films have been so popular for so long.
Still, it’s fun to see just how realistic the F9 stunts actually are, in the case of the landmine race, the logic is a bit iffy. According to Professor Costas Efthimiou, who studies action films as part of his physics work at the University of Central Florida, outrunning a landmine explosion as the crew does in F9 would be nearly impossible. Efthimiou said that even going at high speeds, a car wouldn’t be able to move far enough away from a landmine after triggering it to escape the blast. The delay time on modern landmines is just milliseconds – hardly anything at all – so trying to outrun them probably wouldn’t work out so well in real life.
It is possible that, because the landmine warning sign in F9 appears to be pretty old, the mines in that particular field could be far less advanced. An older mine might mean a longer delay time, which could make the family’s survival a bit more feasible. However, even that would still be a stretch. In reality, especially in the kind of terrain where the action sequence is set, there’s no escaping a landmine’s explosion.
But what fun would Fast and Furious be if all the stunts made sense? F9 even goes a step further than the previous films by making repeated jokes about the characters’ apparent invincibility. Fast and Furious is a series that knows how ridiculous it is, and it leans into that ridiculousness at every opportunity. And to be fair, the landmine sequence in F9: The Fast Saga is far from the franchise’s most ludicrous moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment