Fast X is an overwhelming movie with many emotional details. You have four almost completely separate story themes throughout the movie: Dom investigates the new villain Dante Reyes on his own, Tej, Roman, Han and Ramsey try to stay away from the grid, Dom’s brother Jakob and Little Brian’s son is on a road trip, and Letty and Cipher must work together to escape a black prison in Antarctica.
That last topic is a weird one. It doesn’t take up much of the movie–just three or four scenes, scattered throughout the film in an almost random way because they don’t relate to anything else going on. But more interesting than the theme itself is what it might signal about Cipher’s future. Can they set up a Password to join the family? Yes, they certainly can. I’m not sure they To be do it, but they have certainly put themselves in a position to do so.
I’m not sure that’s the best idea, though. The story has been a huge mess in terms of narrative, and the way they handle Cipher can also overshadow the core themes of the franchise. Let’s break it down.
In The Fate of the Furious, Cipher appears as a thousand wrecking balls. Charlize’s villain Theron immediately positioned himself as the seemingly unforgiving main antagonist of the Fast & Furious franchise. She is a stark contrast to Dominic Toretto, the man who can’t stop turning enemies into relatives, and she intends to mold him to her will. And so she takes his ex-girlfriend Elena and their young son hostage, and forces him to fight against others he holds dear.
That movie was quick to confirm Cipher’s importance to the series, revealing that the villains in the previous two films, Owen Shaw and Mose Jakande, were secretly working for her. Broadly speaking, that also probably places Arturo Braga from the fourth film under her umbrella to some extent, perhaps indirectly through Shaw. A ghostly threat has appeared.
And then in the middle of F8, Cipher cemented her evil with a rather harsh reaction to Dom’s failure to comply 100% with orders during the New York mission: She looked Dom straight in the eye and hugged her son. his brother in his arms while her thug executed Elena. This feels pretty final – we get to watch Dom stare at her well-lit corpse for a while. It’s hard to understand how this could have been faked, or why. So: Elena is dead, because Cipher killed her.
What is Cipher’s plan? Global domination. Total mess. Bad news on the biggest scale this franchise has attempted. The Nightshade device from Fast & Furious 6 could leave any country in the world completely defenseless. The magic eye from Furious 7 is a global surveillance algorithm that can find anyone, anywhere. In F8, she tries to fire a nuclear bomb that could cause war. In F9, she is seeking control of Project Aries, which will allow her to hack any computer system on Earth. All of these are very, very bad, but Cipher really played for the whole shebang by going after all of them.
And in the end, just to drive home, Cipher doesn’t care about anyone but himself. She has no friends or family and doesn’t want them. For her, all the others–all others–just tools used to serve her purpose.
The code exists to be Dom’s antithesis.
Or she did, anyway. It’s hard to say what her deal is after Fast X, a movie that seems intent on rebooting The Cipher’s arc from the ground up – but with Jason Momoa’s Dante Reyes replacing her as the villain main series.
Warning: The rest of this article contains many spoilers for Fast X.
After a lengthy flashback that sends Dante into the climactic heist from the Fast Five, Dante arrives in the present by infiltrating Cipher’s new secret base. He reveals that he tricked her just like she tricked Dom in F8 – but since Cipher didn’t have any relatives, Dante instead kidnapped the families of each of her team members. her and turn them all against her. he can steal God’s Eye’s surveillance technology. He succeeds and tells her men to kill her as he walks out the door.
Cipher fights to get out, then literally walks to Dom’s house to tell him about Dante. And then she was sent to a black prison in Antarctica. She spends the rest of the movie there, eventually teaming up with Letty to escape. Though they never reconnected with any of the other current main actors in this movie, someone showed up in a submarine to pick them up at the very end: Gisele, who we thought was already in the water. died at the end of Fast & Furious 6.
All of this has left Cipher in an ambiguous position. Dante is the new main bad guy. Cipher’s collaboration with Letty seems to have been arranged by Tess (Brie Larson), who is portrayed as very good in Fast X, and it seems Gisele is working for Tess. We don’t know what Cipher knows or her relationship with Tess or Gisele, or whether she knows them personally.
Every time the Code appeared on the screen in Fast X, alarm bells rang in my head. Is this the beginning of an arc of redemption? Are we really abandoning her story and replacing it with Dante’s? Or are we preparing for a three-way battle between Dom, Dante and Cipher?
Can’t know. The main character of Fast X is quite sudden. It’s the kind of ending you’d expect when they’re shooting two movies in a row like the Matrix sequels or Pirates of the Caribbean, where you know they’ve got the overall plot firmly in place. But this isn’t one of those situations – the next movie has yet to begin production and is still years away from release. There’s a good chance they still have absolutely no idea where they’re going with this and with the WGA on strike it could be a while before they do.
It’s annoying anyway, and a sign of a surprising bit of rot at the heart of the franchise. The plots of the Fast & Furious movies become more complicated than they should be, and at the same time rarely commit to any theme for long. Take Han as an example, who was resurrected from the dead in the previous movie with a long story about how he had to fake his own death to save a certain girl’s life and basically raise her like a daughter. mine. That girl is neither seen nor mentioned in Fast X.
Even worse, look at Jakob. This character, Dom’s secret brother played by John Cena, was made for F9, complete with a lengthy flashback plot to explain his existence and why no one has mentioned him before. This. And now, in Fast X, he doesn’t get screen time with any of the main cast members and gets killed (for now) in the big chase at the end. They simply bet on that character.
If that’s how they treat Dom’s brother, what are they doing to Cipher? Judging by the themes they canceled out right from the previous movie, it’s hard not to think that she’s also being turned around in some important way. Obviously I’m not really opposed to Cipher’s redemption arc. I’m just worried they’ll handle it clumsily. For example, by revealing that Elena is still alive and thus letting Cipher escape her death–it’s not an act of redemption if you just reveal that they don’t need to atone. So that explanation would be both unsatisfying and pointless, and yet another example of the recent franchise’s inability to commit to its story.
But what will is a satisfying bow for Cipher? A three-way war would probably be one of the few options suitable for the current situation. Dante is still alive and will obviously continue to be a problem, but that doesn’t stop Cipher from annoying people. And it’s going to be a decent trilogy of themes—you have the kind and healthy family man in Dom, the twisted and disruptive family man in Dante, and the woman who just hates the family. (Cipher). It’s a good group to pit against each other. It is not only one good way to go, but it’s the one that can work.
And if they want to trade Cipher the usual way, by actually getting her to earn it, she’s going to need to do something big. Like “sacrifice yourself to save others” something like that. And that will require a lot more character development to make it work, as she has yet to be depicted as anything but a lousy person in these movies.
But after Fast X, it was hard to count on directors Louis Leterrier and Vin Diesel and other creative decision-makers on the matter to deal with the Cipher situation satisfactorily. While Fast X must have been a huge challenge given the circumstances — with longtime franchise director Justin Lin spending a week shooting and Leterrier taking his place and rewriting it right away — the series The finished film is so fragmented that it is virtually impossible to follow from scene to scene. context.
But I’ve always liked Leterrier as a director, and things could have turned out very differently when he joined the project in the first place like he would in Fast X-2. This brand has been a big part of my life for the past two decades, so I hope for the best when it’s over. I just didn’t expect it.
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