Mission: Impossible 6

Here’s the thing: a HALO jump is no doubt super-exciting (ie: terrifying) for anyone who actually does it, but for those of us watching one in a film, what it is it? Just another parachute jump, only much, much longer. It doesn’t surprise me they’re not included in more films.

McQuarrie made it exciting in “Fallout” because (1) the star of the movie is really doing it, (2) the brilliant camera work makes this abundantly clear, and (3) the mid-air efforts to resuscitate Walker add a “ticking clock” element that makes everything exponentially more urgent. This is literally a new angle on the concept and that’s what makes it interesting. At this point it’s nearly impossible to come up with a new stunt, but with imagination and daring it’s still possible to present them in novel ways. Harold Lloyd movies had car chases decades before Steve McQueen showed up, for instance, but “Bullitt” found a way to make it seem fresh and exciting.

Again, I don’t think “Fallout” is the greatest action movie of all time or even, honestly, anything like a cinema classic. But it earns major points with me for including so many fantastic practical effects in a world where CGI is ruining everything. I don’t care how much money the studios throw at computer graphics, our eyes and brains will always be able to tell the difference between reality and software.

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The funny thing is:
I realy liked this movie, but now it looks like I don’t.

Before I went to see it I only was hearing: “this is the most fantastic action movie you have ever seen”, “there’s no competition”, and even here on this forum I heard things like “this is the Bond movie SPECTRE should have been”, or something like it.

Than I went to see it last weekend and I only was seeing things I have already seen before, especialy in Bond movies, but also in previous M.I. movies which I have mentioned before (there was also already a helicopter chase in M.I.3). For me that was a dissapointing. From a realy great movie, a future classic, I expect something original, something new.
Before the Craig Bond movies every Bond movie had some stunt, or action scene, you never had seen before. This movie has none, how wel it’s made, how great and cool it is to see Cruise doing his own stunts, how exciting it all was, for me this makes it a great, fun and exciting action movie, but not realy better than the two previous ones, or better than the better Bondmovies. Let alone the “best action movie ever made”.

The hype machine at full steam, all part of the business. Next year we’ll use the same superlatives on a different film…

Agreed, hype is often the enemy of a film. Too much and you 're disappointed when it turns out to be, after all, just another film. Too little and it dies a quiet death no matter how good it is. I avoided spoilers for Fallout for more than a year, but even the chorus of “greatest movie ever” was enough to make it a bit of a letdown that it was merely terrific fun.

I know publicity is part of the game these days but one of the greatest experiences I had in the cinema was in 1981 when I saw “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” about which I knew nothing. Zip. Bupkis. I’d heard the title and that it teamed Lucas and Speilberg so naturally I assumed it was some variation on Noah’s Ark In Space. When a TV review showed the first 5 minutes on opening day, I couldn’t get there fast enough.

These days the great ski jump moment in TSWLM would be spoiled in the flipping trailer 6 months before the film 's release.

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That was one huge treasure that defied all categories - and it came totally unexpected. What was it even, a cowboy with a Zorro whip riding on a horse against Nazis, desert, jungle, ancient ruins, supernatural beings? It opened up a whole new genre - its very own genre - and such pioneer spirit has become very rare in the streamlined business.

The days of 1981 look as if a band of talented amateurs just threw masterworks on the market, without regard for target audience, promotional campaigns or suitability to box office. By comparison, even the first press releases announcing a major new production is conceived for maximum impact. And everything we get to see and hear afterwards, all snippets and trailers and twitter buzz, must aim to further lure us.

MI naturally got its fair share of the expert treatment - but we as fans also play our part, our excitement is the wave these productions sail on. When a film like the last Bourne fails to connect with the genre audience its chances to win over the masses are slim to naught.

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That’s true. Which is why I’m seriously considering skipping trailers these days. The cinema-going experience merely becomes filling in gaps from what has already been shown.

Thinking about the HALO jump, I’m not sure if it completely hit the right note for me.

When they add in a CGI storm and insert Paris’ skyline below…how much does it matter that Tom did the jump himself? Y’know? If they’ve already done the trickery I’ve listed, would’ve it really mattered if the scene was done in a wind tunnel ala QoS?

That’s a good point. I like the idea of Cruise hanging from a copter (or a building, or a plane, or a cliff) with safety harnesses, then using computer technology to erase the cables. That, IMHO, is a proper use of technology. But yes, completely altering everything around Cruise (and whoever’s doubling Cavill) is definitely pushing it. That said, fake clouds are a lot more convincing than fake human figures. For instance, about five minutes into an extended action sequence with a CGI-generated Iron Man or Spidey, do we really care what happens to these digital avatars? It would have been just as easy to fake two skydivers covered head to toe in bodysuits and helmets.

And thanks for reminding me of just how dreadful that scene in QoS was. After all those years of trying to fit in the “Bond falls out of the sky into a hole in the ground” bit, we finally see it play out just about as awfully as we figured it would.

I must admit to not seeing the point of having Ethan super agent Not knowing how to fly a helicopter. He has been able to do everything else so the idea of him Not having 'copter skills was a bit strange and a bit out of character.

I would have preferred to see him just get on with it, as did Cruise himself.

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Please NOTE: Spoilers follow:

He probably decided he’d look cooler if instead of already knowing how to do it, he’d just learn as he went along, and end up in five minutes doing it better than the other guy, who did it as his full-time job. I agree you’d think piloting a copter is a skill a superspy would have. Those things are almost as ubiquitous as cars. On the other hand, I thought it was a stretch when Brosnan-Bond knew how to fly a foreign fighter jet in TND (and again, better than anyone else). Unlike copters, you wouldn’t normally expect to find sophisticated fighter jets sitting around in great numbers just waiting to get stolen.

A better question might be why Ethan thinks the best plan for getting the key from Walker is to engineer a mid-air crash of their two copters? Possible outcomes from that scenario include: (1) Walker’s copter ends up in an unreachable crash site (which would indeed have happened if Ethan’s “drop cargo” plan had worked), (2) Walker and the key end up incinerated, (3) Ethan kills himself, (4) a combination of 3 and 4, and so on. Only one out of a few thousand outcomes is the one he wants, and it’s the least likely: “Both of us survive and I get the key from him.”

This is one of those moments when the only way the hero’s actions seem logical is if he knows he’s the hero in an action film, and he’s seen enough of them to know how they end.

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well, Ethan maybe has noticed how highly implausible his life is after 22 years (at least) doing this stuff, and decided just to roll with it.

Hi all,

I’ve been busy and offline for a while but I’d thought I’d pop in just to throw my two cents in on Mission Impossible: Fallout. I finally got a chance to see it last week and while overall it was exciting and action packed, I must admit it wasn’t quite what I was expecting and is definitely NOT one of my favorites, sorry to say. I think perhaps there was TOO MUCH action and not enough of the espionage elements, so it kind of got away from what I loved so much about Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation. Plus I found that I was missing Jeremy Renner more than I was expecting…the chemistry between the team of Benji, Luther, Ethan was feeling his absence. I was disappointed in the outcome of Alec Baldwin’s Alan Hunley…we were just beginning to feel that he was becoming one of the team. The end of Solomon Lane, was just as lame as Blofeld’s end in SPECTRE. They should have just killed him off. If Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation were my Casino Royale and Skyfall of the Mission Impossible franchise, than I’d have to put Fallout as my SPECTRE and or Quantum of Solace. It had it’s moments, but overall I think it’s a bit overrated. I do plan on seeing it again and who knows, maybe I’ll like it better. Right now though, I’d say 7.5 out of 10 in terms of rating and would rank it thus among the other films (in order of best to worst):

  1. Ghost Protocol 2. Rogue Nation 3. Mission Impossible 4. Fallout 5. Mission Impossible 3 6. Mission Impossible 2
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Well, when you start questioning too deeply these things, you’re ultimately going to end up in being disappointed.

Even if we do accept that decisions made in the heat of a mission moment might not always be the correct ones, and that hindsight / armchair reactions are unfair on those making the decisions mid-mission, then we should also Not wonder why Ethan didn’t just draw up behind the other helicopter, and instead of dropping the load from a great height, just let the attached load swing into the rotating blades from behind. And at point of destruction, to then release.

Yunno… Never ends.

Granted, but the trick is to make me not think these things until I’m in the car on the way home. If I’m thinking it while the film’s unspooling, it ain’t good.

That said, if the guy with the thing you need is flying away in a helicopter, Step 1 would have to be getting up in the sky after him, so I’ll give that a pass. It’s the next step – crashing your target’s copter into a body of water where you can’t get to him or the thing you need – that’s daft. Just as well it didn’t work out. Then I guess your options become limited; with no guns to shoot back, all you’ve got is the ramming option. I suppose the way to look at it is not “how do I come out of this with all my objectives achieved” but rather, “Since there’s virtually no chance for a happy ending, now, at least I can make sure this scumbag doesn’t walk away unscathed.”

Anyway, whether he drops the cargo and hopes it hits, or swings the cargo into Walker’s copter and then releases, my problem is it was dumb to try it over that body of water, if the goal was to retrieve the key. Once the copter sank, it would’ve been game over.

But yeah, best not to think. The stock in trade of M:I, and to some extent spy films in general, is to overload you with exposition and “twists and turns” to simulate a sophisticated plot, when on even a casual review 90% of what happens is nonsense.

One question I had during both viewings of MI6 was how much does Plutonium weigh? Wouldn’t it be too heavy to lift? So I looked it up.

A cubic foot weighs 1339 pounds, or 562 kilograms. Most likely too much for any one person to lift in a brief case. But how much plutonium is shown? The spheres look about 3 inches in radius, giving each a volume of 113 cubic inches. A cubic inch of plutonium is 11 ounces or 0.33 kg. So each sphere is about 80 pounds (37 kg), or 240 pounds (112 kg) for all three. Not unmanageable but definitely hard to toss 20 feet over to a car.

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Having seen the first 5…I’m going to go out on a limb and say the laws of physics in MI world are very different to reality.

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That’s truly interesting. I’ve never thought too hard about how much something like that would weigh. I want my money back…

:wink:

I decided to research it because of an article I read about the “science” of Ant-Man. Basically, if Ant-Man keeps his density when he shrinks, he’d be as dense as a white dwarf star. When he’s Giant-Man, he’d be as light as a Macy’s Day parade balloon float.

So I started to wonder about the science of Mission Impossible since plutonium is a heavy metal after all.

True. I’m thinking they probably wanted the visual of the cargo hitting the water, to bring that aspect of the location into the picture, and make it look more dramatic/interesting. Narratively, they needed the cargo to miss for a number of reasons, so I’m okay with that side of things.

Good points all.

Saw it again last night, and it was even better this time around.

Seeing it put this way, it really makes the distance between the films in the Craig era seem all the more tragic. There’s only been one more Craig film than there’s been US presidential elections in the same time frame. EON really needs to pick up the pace a bit.

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