Just imagine your eighteen and a trailer is out for a movie about the car scene. Its got amped up Limp Bizkit music, shows customized cars racing and dodging the cops, looks amazing. The trailer for the first Fast And The Furious might be farther from the material than it looks like at first. Being movie number one of a massive block buster series kind of takes away from what it was. Let’s forget all the other money printers made after this 2001 summer hit. Let’s forget about the ridiculousness it turned into and remember why the first movie was so good. It’s honestly because the car world was just a cover for one of the best modern westerns ever made. It’s an old western at heart, change the cars to horses, and the bustling city to a small pioneering town on the fringes of modern society. It’s about a law man joining a gang to take it down, then understanding what they were about before letting them get away. It’s quite an amazing piece of filming. Even the very first scene is a insane stage coach robbery going well before the law catches up with them. The black civics with green under glow were black horses in the night. The second scene catches up with Brian O’Connor practicing in his police provided tuner car. Respectable but not quite real deal. As the movie unfolds he looses his car and himself into their family gang, and builds a car with them culminating to him having a showdown with the leader Dom at the end. The movie covers all the aspects of an amazing fight, good guys vs. bad guys and the grey in between. A lot of westerns circle around this same issue. When you have heroes that blur the line between good guy and bad guy. After a spectacular crash (which by the way was unrealistic enough to be fun but no where near the hilarity of later movies) you watch as Brian hands over the keys to his own car and lets the bad guy get away. It shows how complicated honor can get. The movie covers so much more than it advertised, and its legacy is marred by fun but silly movies that’ll never really feel the same cause eventually it turned into a faster crazier series to impress. The first one wasn’t written or even directed by car guys and Having us car guys stay to the cars actually made the movie so so good. So when you get a chance watch it again but put those western glasses on, and take it in.