Nary a review goes by without a dig at the films' persistence in breaking the laws of physics. Therefore, this edition of Cinema Science will primarily address how you can facilitate discussion and exploration of these films' realism or lack thereof.
Are they fast, furious and fully fantastical, or are their high-octane stunts, in fact, relatively realistic? That's a question without easy answers--precisely the kind of question you want in a science classroom.
While I personally find these movies entertaining, it's worth clarifying that it's impossible to justify sitting down with a science or mathematics class and watching the entirety of even one of the eight and counting films in the franchise. Thankfully, you don't have to!
As befitting the modern blockbuster model, these films are built around extended set pieces that you can devote a small chunk of class time to watching and analysing without needing to worry about providing narrative context.
Of these set pieces, a good proportion involves cars being launched long distances into the air or from great heights in increasingly implausible circumstances. In the modern era, such stunts seem comparatively quaint; Furious 7 James Wan, propels a multimillion-dollar sports car between Abu Dhabi's Etihad Towers, while the eighth instalment, The Fate of the Furious F Gary Gray, , sees cars leaping over submarines.
And even if steel [was diamagnetic], those things weigh a ton! Perhaps the most outlandish scene for Ryan is the incredible sequence involving a magnet so strong that it manages to drag a car through a building — all the way from another street.
It would just be a mountain of steel. Stephen Kelly is a freelance culture and science journalist. He is a big fan of Studio Ghibli movies, the apparent football team Tottenham Hotspur and writing short biographies in the third person. That's gonna give us another 2, pounds. Dom is pounds, and the car is 4, pounds. That gives us a total weight of 16, pounds that his car has to accelerate.
If you ever tried to move something heavy, like a refrigerator or a bookcase, you push on it, and it doesn't move. And you push harder, it doesn't move. And you push harder, and finally it moves. That moment when it moves, you've just overcome the static frictional force. The static frictional force is higher than the kinetic frictional force. And what that means in real-people talk is that once you get something moving, it's much easier to keep it moving.
So the question is, is it possible for this Charger SRT to overcome the friction needed to move? So we're gonna calculate how long it would take him to accelerate up to 50 miles an hour. We've got the horsepower car accelerating 16, pounds. And it turns out that would take about 5. So the fact that he got the car accelerating that fast, that definitely couldn't happen in real life. But that's without friction. So once you put friction in, what you find if you calculate is that the coefficient of friction between, like, steel and asphalt is pretty high.
And you probably could not, even with a nitrous oxide boost, get the vault moving. So, once you got it moving, you could keep it moving.
What the folks have said who did this stunt, they found the same thing. They learned a lot about static friction the hard way. And they actually put a slippery material on the bottom of the vault to get it moving. But one of the problems with that is when you make something easier to start moving, you also make it easier to stop moving. And my understanding is they were very surprised when they thought it would come to a stop and it took a lot longer to stop than they thought it would. The other thing is the question of, you have this fairly small mass of a car and Dom.
That's about 2, pounds. And the mass of the vault, which is about 15, pounds. So you've got something that's seven times bigger than something else. Now, think about when they're coming down and then Dom starts, stops, and he lets the vault sort of swing around. The vault is, you know, seven times heavier than Dom and his car.
And I just don't buy that he has enough traction to swing the vault without the vault pulling his car along. Making these stunts work in real life, with practical effects and not CGI, so they built something like seven or eight different vaults with different weights so that they could do all the different parts with the vault. And in fact, in some points, they actually had a little semi cab inside the vault and the vault was driving around by itself. So I would give this stunt a five.
I mean, we've all tried to go up a down escalator, right? That's all he's doing there. This whole stunt relies on the person being able to run faster than the bus is falling. When they filmed this, the stuntperson did actually run up the bus as it was falling.
I had some real questions, because it's not like you're pushing off something solid. You're pushing off something that's moving in the other direction. It spun around to be in exactly the right position for him to grab the bar.
When he's holding the bar and she stops suddenly, you get this really great example of Newton's law of motion where an object in motion will keep moving, because she stops the car, and he keeps going flying around. I would give this one a 10 for running up the bus. I thought that was really creative and totally possible. Again, you see a lot of tight shots, so it does make it hard to see what's going on necessarily. This is a Lykan hypercar, and it's got horsepower.
There's only seven of them in the world. Sometimes I think they put it in slow motion just so people like me can't do the detailed calculations and mess with them. How fast do you have to be going so that you can span the distance between the buildings? So, if we assume that distance is feet, you're gonna fall a little bit. So anytime something comes off horizontally, it's going to go down a little bit. And you can actually see it in there, that it probably falls about two stories, which is roughly 20 feet.
And so the question is, how fast do you have to be going to fall two stories in feet of horizontal distance? If you're gonna fall two floors, it would take just a little more than a second, and you'd need to be going miles per hour.
However, Professor Efthimiou has some quibbles. 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.
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.
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. Bill is an experienced reporter who's covered entertainment and fandom since He's done everything from unearthing the discarded Game of Thrones pilot script in a library in Texas to finding out why Steve left Blue's Clues. He also enjoys eating Taco Bell and drinking chocolate milk. By Bill Bradley Published Jul 04, Share Share Tweet Email 0.
Bill Bradley Articles Published Bill is an experienced reporter who's covered entertainment and fandom since
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