Real-life astronaut Chris Hadfield breaks down F9: The Fast Saga‘s scenes in outer space, explaining that there’s one thing the movie actually gets right. Released in 2021, the ninth film in the mainline Fast & Furious franchise sees Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto return to face off against his estranged brother. The film features some of the most over-the-top action in the series, with one memorable sequence seeing Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Ludacris) get launched into outer space in a Pontiac Fiero.

While the F9 space scene is undeniably far-fetched, Hadfield reveals in an interview with Vanity Fair that there’s one aspect of it that is surprisingly accurate.

While, on a technical level, it’s clear that a Fiero spaceship isn’t viable, there’s one moment of reflection in the sequence that strikes Hadfield as true to his own experiences. Check out his full comment below:

“Like a billion other people on Earth, I really like the Fast and Furious series. It’s almost just purely a cartoon, but unavoidably fun to follow and watch it. They launch off the back of that airplane, it’s like a C-141 but with two engines. Their engines fire and now they’re rocketing into space, and like 30 seconds later they’re in orbit. It took me eight and a half minutes, so they really went fast. They were getting crushed.

“But I love the scene when those two guys, and you see it reflected in their visors, are suddenly, actually, seeing Earth from space. The beauty of that, and the wonder of it they’re emoting there, it feels just like that. Suddenly, all the blue is below you, you’re out in the eternal blackness and all of life is laid out there in this beautiful curving arc of the world under them. And I’m really pleased that they put that into the movie, and then portrayed it so well.”

Why F9’s Outer Space Scene Was So Divisive

Although the Fast & Furious franchise may have started as a somewhat grounded series about street racing and small-time criminals, it eventually becomes something entirely different following 2011’s Fast Five. The stunts start to become increasingly outrageous, the stakes are world-endingly high, Dom essentially becomes superhuman, and the laws of physics start to mean very little. This movement toward ridiculousness really comes to a head in F9, which arguably remains the single most outrageous sequel yet.

Dom’s early car stunt involving somehow attaching a cable to his wheel in order to jump a giant chasm appears to be the most cartoonish Fast & Furious sequence yet, until a Pontiac Fiero is launched into space later in the movie. It was long joked about before F9 that the franchise would eventually go to outer space, but the film actually doing it represents a major shift for the series. Any notion that Fast & Furious still had a foot in reality suddenly went out the window.

While this lean into ridiculousness has been welcomed by some as all part of the fun of Fast & Furious, for others it was a turning point that represented the franchise almost becoming a parody of itself. There’s no outer space sequence in Fast X, but that film, too, largely maintains the previous film’s momentum. It’s unclear what will be to come in the planned sequels, but F9: The Fast Saga has evidently set the tone for the movies to come.

Source: Vanity Fair/ YouTube