Only a few flaws of physics in ‘Furious 7’
height of 10,000 feet and go right on rolling along. A man clambers atop a jackknifed bus as it slides off a cliff, beating gravity as he leaps onto a vehicle racing past. A custom-made auto flies between skyscrapers high above Abu Dhabi.
The reaction most viewers have upon watching the movie is simple: Can any of this actually happen?
Sitting in the back of the theater, Kleban watched acutely as some of the more eye-popping stunts went down.
In one, the members of Diesel’s strike team backed cars out of an airplane, tumbling between the clouds as they screamed toward the mountain roads of Azerbaijan. Kleban studied the scene as it played, then said after the screening that he didn’t see a physics-based reason it couldn’t happen the way it did on screen.
“You’d need the best equipment, and you’d need everything to go right, like landing in the exact right spot, but there’s no reason a car couldn’t parachute down and keep right on driving,” Kleban said.
The parachute would have to be designed with the highest degree of strength and size. And of course, the car would still be coming in hard even with an open parachute. But it would be able to “flare up” in the last seconds, converting its high amount of vertical speed to horizontal speed, sufficiently slowing its drop.
In fact, a long pre-parachute freakout by someone inside the car, as happens in the film, wouldn’t even be