“Everyone has their own idea of what is forgivable in a fictional universe,” he says. Grabinski had latched on to Han’s smooth and even-keeled charm, and he couldn’t believe the man responsible for eliminating Han from the franchise was now part of Dom’s family. Upon seeing the eighth movie, filmmaker BenDavid Grabinski visited a local bar to commiserate with Los Angeles Times entertainment reporter Jen Yamato. “It felt like this beloved character was being tossed aside,” Lin says. How could Han, who embodied such cool charisma in Tokyo Drift and became increasingly instrumental to each sequel’s global appeal, be so casually dismissed and forgotten by his family members? Lin, who originally conceived the Korean character and bent time to include him in his three sequels, struggled to comprehend the creative decisions being made in his absence. As if he was nothing.” -Justin Linįor a franchise built so religiously on the themes of loyalty and family, in which backyard, Corona-fueled dinners function as semi-communions, Dom’s easy forgiveness felt like a betrayal. “It felt like this beloved character was being tossed aside. (Barbecues are like the Marriage at Cana in the Fast universe-truly sacred events.) By the end of the film, Dom is sharing food and drink with the villainous character at a rooftop barbecue. Dom lets him in the same room as his only child without even a mention of Han. In The Fate of the Furious, Shaw, the man who killed their friend in cold blood, is brought into the fold to take down a common enemy. But just as quickly as they achieved vengeance did they erase it. In the next film, Furious 7, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his devoted clan all vowed to avenge Han’s death, and were successful, defeating Shaw and sending him to a maximum security prison. The end of the sixth film closed that confounding time loop in its end credits, restaging Han’s death scene but showing that actually, a British assassin named Deckard Shaw-brother to the villain in Fast & Furious 6, and therefore a main boss of sorts-was responsible for it. But he was not gone forever-the fourth, fifth, and sixth films revealed themselves to be prequels to Tokyo Drift, and therefore able to feature a still-breathing Han. He was also killed in that film, dying in a fiery car crash in the Tokyo streets. The important parts, for our purposes, are this: The fan-favorite street racer Han Lue (Sung Kang) was introduced in 2006’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the series’ third installment. Keeping track of it all is like maintaining a tome on Arthurian legend. There is some deep mythology in the Fast franchise at this point, full of hard-earned lessons and blood-bonded relationships. “I’ll be honest, I was a little bit upset.” (“You’re not going to be a fanboy of every movie after you leave something that took almost half your life,” says Sung Kang, who stood next to Lin on stage that night.) “I was baffled,” Lin recalls. Subsequently, he hadn’t heard about its controversial ending. Gary Gray, which had been released two weeks earlier. He hadn’t seen the series’ eighth installment, The Fate of the Furious, directed by F. Lin, the director responsible for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth movies in the high-octane franchise, was caught off guard. But during the Q&A portion of the event, one audience member switched topics and pressed the filmmaker to respond to the recent Fast & Furious hashtag that was quickly gaining steam around the internet. Following a special 15th anniversary screening of Better Luck Tomorrow, the director had taken the stage at the Egyptian Theatre to reminisce about his early indie breakthrough alongside the cast. The first time Justin Lin heard about #JusticeForHan, he was under a bright spotlight at the 2017 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.
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