Mission: Impossible IV - Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams reunite -2011

That's what I thought he was going to do. The first rumors I heard about the first M:I film featured exactly that - Cruise as Phelps.

 

It is my understanding that an electric heart can't start a stopped heart but only restart a heart that's that not beating correctly.

 

Actually, the purpose of defibrillation is to stop an erratic heartbeat, whereupon either the heart's natural rhythm reasserts itself or the patient is revived by other means. It's not a magic on/off switch for the heart the way it's portrayed in fiction. Applying a shock to a healthy heart may very well cause fibrillation.

But hey, it's hardly the stupidest thing in the M:I movies. In the first movie, isn't Hunt about five feet away from an exploding helicopter inside a tunnel? The overpressure shock would probably kill him even before the shrapnel tore him to ribbons.

 

Kinda ment with my post. That's why they call it a "defibrillator" it defibrillates. A stopped heart is just stopped.

But, yeah, this is something messed up in all fiction, has bled over in to misconceptions in real-life, and hardly the silliest thing in the MI movies.

 

My point is, the defibrillator doesn't restart a heart as you said; it stops an erratic heartbeat, and the stopped heart restarts itself (or if it doesn't, it's restarted by other medical means like heart massage).

I just had the thought that the fictional depiction of defibrillators vis-a-vis the heart is analogous to the sitcom depiction of bumps on the head vis-a-vis memory. One violent shock to the system shuts it down completely, but a second violent shock restores it to perfect function rather than compounding the damage. Which is kind of like assuming that if your car got damaged in a crash, the way to fix it is to crash it into something else.

 

According to the The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier , difficulties with Steven Hill's Orthodox Jewish practices was what prompted episodes that featured only Landau and Bain. There's even one episode where Cinnamon Carter accepts the mission in lieu of Dan Briggs (as Hill was slowly being written out of the show). Moreover, Landau and Bain's characters proved to be the most popular in the first year.

IIRC, there's a second season episode that features Rollin Hand and Jim Phelps on a mission without the rest of the team. I believe it's the episode that Joan Collins guest stars in. (I don't have my copy of the Complete Dossier handy to check.)

 

Yes, I know that about Hill. What's odd is this: In the first season, because of the gradual phasing out of Hill's lead role, the show increasingly became "The Adventures of Rollin Hand and His Friends" -- even though Landau was technically only a "special guest star" for the entire season. So what I'm wondering is, when they dropped Hill for the second season, why did they bring in Peter Graves at all? Why not just promote Landau officially to the lead role that he already effectively held anyway?

And the more variable team composition of the first season was one of the things I liked about it. The original idea was that Briggs picked whichever team members were appropriate for a given mission, and it stood to reason that it would be a different team each time. You still had Rollin, Cinnamon, Barney, and Willy showing up on a frequent basis, but they weren't all on every mission and there were plenty of guest specialists as needed. (Indeed, in the earliest episodes, it seemed they were going for a format where the special guest agent of the week would generally be the dramatic focus of the story.) Later, they started using the full ensemble every week because the audience wanted to see the familiar characters (or because the studio wanted to get the most for the money they were spending on the regulars), but it became less believable that every mission just happened to require the same mix of talents.

 

But others may not; hence, my response to that particular part of your statement.

If I had my copy of the Dossier, I'd check to see if this was addressed in the chapter on the second season (which includes a long bit about the casting of Graves).

 

To clarify further, if anyone's wondering about the "difficulties with Hill's Orthodox Jewish practices," it wasn't anything anti-Semitic. It's just that he refused to work on the Sabbath, which meant from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, so that cut into his availability for shooting. They tried to work with him to accommodate his schedule, but it proved more difficult than they thought.

Actually the final straw wasn't about that. During the shooting of "Action!", he refused to climb a wooden staircase with no railing, even though he'd done riskier stunts in previous weeks. He locked himself in his dressing room over it. The producers wrote him out of that episode (making it the only time Cinnamon Carter gets the tape briefing, though Rollin's in charge for the remainder of the episode), and began reducing his role in the remaining episodes of the season. Sometimes he'd just give the briefing and not go on the mission (something that was done a few times earlier in the season as well), though in one episode Briggs spent most of the mission in disguise and thus was mainly played by James Daly.

 

So they've been meeting with directors for this movie, and recent notable names have included Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), but the latest name to surface -- which would mark his live action film debut -- is Brad Bird, writer/director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille.

 

^
Brad Bird should direct the next Superman movie...not this crap.

 

Maybe this movie will show Bird's live-action chops, and then Nolan will hire him to direct Superman.

And then Bird will hire Tom Cruise to play Lex Luthor, Craig T. Nelson to play Perry White, Michelle Monaghan to play Lois Lane and Vin Diesel to play Brainiac.

 

^Vin for Luthor maybe? A bit of a bold choice but physically, he'd be not unlike the Dini/Timm TAS version.

 

Mission Impossible is lame...I enjoyed the first movie.

Brad Bird should write and direct a Superman movie.

Brandon Routh looks like Tom Cruise...have him do MI4 and continue being Superman...and play Maverick in Top Gun...the remake.

 

^ He looks like Tom but is about a foot taller. I think he sounds even more like him than he looks like him though.

 

Brad Bird would be an excellent choice to direct Mission: Impossible IV.

 

I would watch this if Brad Bird directed it.

 

I love the first m:i and #3. I am pumped for #4.
tom cruise is wacky but he makes a damn good flick

 

If Bird directs, shouldn't they call it Mission: Incredible?