Vin Diesel Says Fast And Furious Is Just Like Lord Of The Rings
Vin Diesel compared Fast & Furious to Lord of the Rings, especially the Fast X movie.
Vin Diesel has all the time in the world for family, but perhaps not enough time to write them all into an over-the-top car chase in the Fast & Furious franchise. In a recent video that’s gone viral on Twitter, courtesy of the golden check mark-clad Variety account, Vin Diesel has compared the iconic series to the Lord of the Rings, as a long-running anthology. In the video, the Groot voice actor was questioned about the difficulty of continuing the now decades-old series, before explaining that the behind-the-scenes work has become the hardest part, stating, “There’s a reason why Tolkien stopped writing after a while” and agreeing with his interviewer that “This is the Lord of the Rings of action movies.”
Some Twitter users were quick to point out the flaw in Vin Diesel’s logic, given that J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t so much “stop writing” so much as he “died of a stomach ulcer at age 81.” Tolkien is still largely considered the father of high fantasy, revitalizing the genre and bringing it into prominence for a wide audience with works such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series. Others believed Diesel’s comment, which was spoken between laughs, to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Fast & Furious series’ highly campy, over-the-top tone, identifying sarcastically with a great writer for the purpose of humorous juxtaposition.
Regardless of the behind-the-scenes fatigue, Vin Diesel continues to remain hard at work producing and starring in the film series, currently preparing the tenth installment to roll into theaters on May 19th. Universal studios announced this week that Jason Momoa and Brie Larson have joined the cast of Fast X, alongside a returning ensemble of the greatest action stars of the past decade. Momoa is of course best known for his performance in the DCU’s Aquaman films, for which he plays the title character, as well as a brief but memorable stint in the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Fast X is said to take the franchise from Los Angeles to Rome, Brazil, and Antarctica, truly making the high-octane action-adventure film an epic worthy of the Lord of the Rings comparison, as the film’s official synopsis details the forging of allies and enemies on the road to discover the true meaning of family. Since the saga’s inception with 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, the series has continued to ratchet up the intensity and insanity, enlisting the talent of a host of big-name actors such as Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, John Cena, and Charlize Theron along the way. Vin Diesel has been producing films since 2009’s Fast & Furious, taking a more hands-on role behind the scenes.
With the tagline of the tenth film being “The end of the road begins” the series will end with one of two final parts. Previous iterations of the series have been marked as the end of the journey before, just for Vin Diesel to take to social media to rally his base of insatiable fans for yet another venture into the great unknown of vehicular madness.
So the real question is, could Vin Diesel continue to make Fast & Furious films well past the age of 81? And if so, does that mean that the Fast & Furious franchise isn’t just the so-called Lord of the Rings of action movies, but perhaps the next logical step in a J.R.R. Tolkien-inspired anthology of modern fantasy? Only time will tell.
