I Watched Every Single Fast & the Furious Movie. Here's What It Taught Me.

Family.

Ok, I like good bad movies. Like, I think that some movies are purposefully bad, as in cheesy or campy. When I share this opinion with people, I often get recommended to watch the hit franchise The Fast and the Furious. Now, I'm not really a HUGE car guy, and I'm also not a huge ACTION movie guy, so I was never super eager to do so. But, I noticed Hulu had all of them, and so I thought I'd watch the first one and see how it was. This sent me down a rabbit hole of cars, testosterone, and cool dudes (and women) kicking butt. Here's a rough review of the franchise, and what I learned from it. Buckle up. Here we go.

The Half-Pipe of Enjoyment

My enjoyment of the Fast franchise is an inverse bell curve. The Fast and the Furious (1) is just a good movie. It's actually just compelling and fun. John Walker and Vin Diesel have great chemistry, and the story- while a bit cliché- is pretty entertaining. 2 Fast 2 Furious, which is the best sequel name ever (and I'm sad it didn't continue like this- 3 Fast 3 Furious, all the way up to 10), is a fairly good follow-up. F3: Tokyo Drift, is not very good. It's almost completely separate from the normal Fast chronology. F4, 5, and 6 are... Bad. They're not good enough to be good, and they're not bad enough to be bad. However, it's around the end of F6 that I believe the writer begin to realize they do not want to make car movies and instead want to make superhero movies.

From the opening of F7, it's clear things are different. The heroes steal cars on a train, and jump off of this train, and then drive off of a cliff into a lake below. In the same movie, Vin Diesel is thrown around 100 feet and lands on a car, but is completely fine. Because the car broke his fall. Obviously. The movies get even crazier and crazier from here on. I'm talking driving off of skyscrapers onto other skyscrapers. I'm talking drifting across an ice field dodging a nuclear-armed submarine. I'm talking strapping a rocket to a car and flying into space. Several characters come back from the dead. Amnesia tropes. The whole nine yards.

But here's the thing, once these things started happening, I started enjoying the movies much more. There are only so many ways to make car movie interesting, but there are LOTS of ways to make car movies crazy.

What I Learned

After watching all of these movies, I was pretty tired of watching these movies, but I will absolutely be going to see Fast X 2 when it releases. By the end of the final movie, I had fully become invested in anything that these movies would throw at me. It was so crazy that I just started saying "Yeah OK, what next?" I realized that I had become addicted to the insanity that these movies were constantly showing off.

It made me realize that when I'm making games and writing stories, I don't have to focus on making my story particularly serious or believable. Even if I start writing the story with a certain mood, it's okay for me to change the vibe as long as I keep enjoying what I'm doing. It's very clear that these movies prioritize fun over consistency or narrative cohesion or even logic. That's absolutely the kind of energy I want to bring to my projects.

In addition, these movies started as serious films, and as they kept trying to be serious, they started to get stale. Once the formula got stale, they changed, and the movies got better! That's something else that I'd like to be okay with incorporating into my games and stories. If something starts to feel stale to me, it probably feels very stale to the player. I need to make sure that I am open to changing things up, or at the very least be aware when my standard gameplay loop starts to slow down.

Final Thoughts

Overall, these movies were a blast, a reminded me to have fun with what I do. There's always an audience to be found for the content I make, and so I can keep an open mind while creating. I don't need to stick with the same vibe all throughout, and I shouldn't be afraid to take detours in tone to keep things fresh.