Unfortunately, this was after filming on F9 had already wrapped, and the film was still months from release. Thanks to pandemic delays, the highly anticipated flick was also pushed back to mid-2021 – a year after the failed Hydrogen One was discontinued – leaving Dom and co. fiddling with some high concept tech that perhaps even your most gadget-obsessed friend would struggle to remember from the recent past.
F9 wasn’t the only big 2021 movie that embraced the distinctive phone, though. Netflix’s smash hit climate change satire Don’t Look Up also featured various characters handing the “BASH LiiF” celly, a new smartphone release lauded by BASH company founder Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) in the film. But the BASH Liif was just RED’s Hydrogen One with some poetic license, and this time it had intentionally stood in for that movie’s next gen product in a pinch thanks to prop master Michael Bates.
“I remember asking him early on like, ‘Michael, how are we going to have a phone that doesn’t just look like your standard phones that are out there?’” Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay told CNET. “And he goes, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it,’ And then he comes back with that phone. He goes, ‘This is a whole cellphone that [RED] made. They never released it. Check it out.’ And I started playing with it. I was like, ‘Why didn’t they release this? This is incredible.’ But apparently it’s technically not consumer-friendly.”
It may not have been “consumer-friendly” but the Hydrogen One ended up leaving an indelible mark on 2021 cinema nonetheless! Oh, and it also popped up in Marvel’s Runaways, where it masqueraded as the evil ‘Corvus’ phone that had world domination firmly on its mind.
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue8yoraKdXa%2B8r7GOoaawZZZueqa6w56bZq2gYsSqwMdmq6GZpGK9tsbZpaCnn12lv7Cw1JyrZqiclrCmucSnq2g%3D