"They were getting crushed."

Road Trip

To say that the 2021 action blockbuster "F9: The Fast Saga," the ninth installment of the uber-popular "Fast & Furious" franchise, isn't the most scientifically sound movie to have been set in space would be a vast understatement.

In the movie — spoilers ensue — two characters played by Tyrese Gibson and Christopher "Ludacris" Bridges launch a cobbled-together spacecraft made out of a 1984 Pontiac Fiero into space after being released from the back of a massive airplane mid-flight.

Now, in a new Vanity Fair video, Canadian veteran astronaut Chris Hadfield reviewed the scene, pointing out some glaring discrepancies between the two characters' experiences of rocketing into space and his own.

But that doesn't mean he wasn't entertained.

"Like a billion other people on Earth, I really like the 'Fast & Furious' series," Hadfield said in the video. "It’s almost just purely a cartoon, but unavoidably fun to follow and watch it."

Remix to Transmission

Still, according to Hadfield, it wasn't the most accurate portrayal of space travel.

"Their engines fire and now they’re rocketing into space, and like 30 seconds later they’re in orbit," he said. "It took me eight and a half minutes, so they really went fast. They were getting crushed."

The former astronaut also pointed out how ridiculous it was to use a stick shift in a spacecraft.

"I haven't driven a Fiero in a while, but I've flown some rocket ships and they don't have a transmission that you shift," Hadfield mused.

Beautiful Curving Arc

The idea of having the "Fast & Furious" franchise rocket into space started as a joke, with "F9" executive producer Josh Henson recalling in a 2021 Vulture article that an original pitch for the movie included having Vin Diesel's character racing the "original Moon rover" on the lunar surface.

While the movie didn't end up going quite as far as that, director Justin Lin took the idea seriously and even "got on the phone with NASA scientists," as he told Vulture, "and I’m picking their brains about how to do it."

Of course, with or without the involvement of real-life rocket scientists, the blockbuster movie primarily exists to entertain, and continuously demands its audience to suspend their disbelief even down on the Earth's surface.

But according to Hadfield, the movie did get one thing right: the two space travelers' emotional reactions to seeing the Earth glide by far beneath them.

"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," Hadfield said in the video. "And I’m really pleased that they put that into the movie, and then portrayed it so well."

More on Hadfield: Former Astronaut Details Quest to Grow Cannabinoids in Space


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