There’s a new trailer for F9, the upcoming release in the Fast and Furious saga that was previously delayed, and it has a lot of what you expect: Pounding music, Vin Diesel looking cool while perpetually shifting gears, and crashes, crashes, and more crashes. But there are a couple of other elements in this behind-the-scenes-ish trailer that are worthy of note: Cameras, dollies, car-cannons, ramps, and other stunt rigs.
We imagine that is very deliberate, because one of the (very legitimate) criticisms of the FnF movies (particularly 2004’s 2 Fast 2 Furious) was that there were too many computer-generated stunts. Maybe the public night be fooled, and maybe they wouldn’t be, but car fanatics like us know how a car should move, and it was pretty obvious that a lot of the stunt driving wasn’t actual driving.
We know that a lot of people lobbed to change that, and starting with Tokyo Drift, there was an effort to use real-life stunt drivers instead of CGI. This trailer shows that while the computers may still be at work in post, F9 will still feature real, honest-to-goodness, metal-bending, glass-shattering, real car crashes.
Granted, we’re not a fan of seeing classics and other desirable autos destroyed. Seeing a classic second-gen Nova shot off a ramp hurts our hearts a little, But a Toyota 86 getting flung roof-first into the side of a box truck? That, friends, is entertainment.