Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (Cruise, Renner, Pegg, Rhames)
- Thread starter Aragorn
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Well Bond also gives his real name nearly everywhere he goes (in the coolest and most memorable way possible, of course), which I'm guessing is something real spies often try not to do.
In fact, as I understand it, real spies don't go undercover at all anymore, because the other side already knows who they are. We live in an information age, after all. Modern international spies generally just work out of embassy offices as handlers for local operatives that they recruit to gather information for them.
^Exactly why Bond and similar spy stories are fantasies.
Mission: Impossible, the series, had its credibility problems with all the undercover work too. For instance, Cinnamon Carter was supposed to be a famous supermodel, Rollin Hand and Paris were famous magicians, Barney Collier owned a prominent electronics firm, and Willy Armitage was an acclaimed circus strongman, and yet somehow nobody ever recognized them, even on stateside missions.
Mission: Impossible, the series, had its credibility problems with all the undercover work too. For instance, Cinnamon Carter was supposed to be a famous supermodel, Rollin Hand and Paris were famous magicians, Barney Collier owned a prominent electronics firm, and Willy Armitage was an acclaimed circus strongman, and yet somehow nobody ever recognized them, even on stateside missions.
They're both fantasies in that regard, the only difference is that Bond is a killer, ther IMF has real lfe jobs that the writers can plug into teh heist story of the week.
As it was said in Rogue Nation, their jobs are to balance the scales for their various governments. The Rogue Nation idea could've been an ongoing threat in future I:M movies, but not now. It is intresting to note that Hunt was put in the case against the Syndicate at the end of Ghost Protocol, the IMF seemed to know about the Syndicate at that point. Adn I think it's the only an assignment was carried from a previous movie.
Didn't Cinnamon actually use her real VIP identity a few times?
Maybe three or four times. Most of the time, she was pretending to be someone else.
The fluid filled computer core--I wonder if that was influenced by the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory located under Mount Kamioka.
We saw NIF used as a movie set after all.
Look out for these to be shown on screen--if not by JJ then by someone else
https://fotki.yandex.ru/next/users/haematique/album/124149/view/466450
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2015-07/24/content_36136455.htm
We saw NIF used as a movie set after all.
Look out for these to be shown on screen--if not by JJ then by someone else
https://fotki.yandex.ru/next/users/haematique/album/124149/view/466450
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2015-07/24/content_36136455.htm
Just out of curiosity I rewatched the original MI movie for the first time in probably 15 years, and wow, what a different style it had from everything that followed.
De Palma directed it more like a moody, old-fashioned spy thriller than an actual action movie, and in fact Ethan Hunt doesn't even fight anybody until the very end (or shoot anybody I believe). And the guy he does fight is an old man... which is actually more like just a few seconds of grappling.
And of course there are the outdated computers and references to "The Internet" like it's this strange new thing and the fact that even in the 90s people are still relying on payphones to make calls.
And like with every MI movie, I have to wonder, how is it these top secret facilities have all these super elaborate, complex security measures... that the team just happens to know every tiny little detail of beforehand, down to the exact timing?? Wouldn't keeping all that information secret be yet another one of the security measures the facility took?
De Palma directed it more like a moody, old-fashioned spy thriller than an actual action movie, and in fact Ethan Hunt doesn't even fight anybody until the very end (or shoot anybody I believe). And the guy he does fight is an old man... which is actually more like just a few seconds of grappling.
And of course there are the outdated computers and references to "The Internet" like it's this strange new thing and the fact that even in the 90s people are still relying on payphones to make calls.
And like with every MI movie, I have to wonder, how is it these top secret facilities have all these super elaborate, complex security measures... that the team just happens to know every tiny little detail of beforehand, down to the exact timing?? Wouldn't keeping all that information secret be yet another one of the security measures the facility took?
The M:I film series didn't really begin to feel like an actual series until the fourth movie came along and had continuity with the third. Each of the first three movies felt like a totally separate creature, despite the common title and lead character. And there's a large stylistic difference between III and Ghost Protocol as well (for one thing, III is basically Alias: The Movie while GP actually feels like a Mission: Impossible story for the first time since the first act of the DePalma film). It's just about the least stylistically cohesive film "series" I've ever seen.
That was a trope of the TV series as well. A large part of the running time of any episode was showing how Barney and the others managed to circumvent the bad guys' security. And in general, they had all the information they needed to totally control the situation. It was rare in the series that the team was ever caught off guard or surprised by anything, which meant the show often lacked suspense.
But it's justifiable, since unearthing secret information is what spies do. It was always implicit in the show that, before "the Secretary" assigned the mission to the IMF, some other secret agents had actually discovered that the evil plot was happening in the first place, and had done the initial research to gather the intelligence the team needed to carry out the mission. In the '88 series, when they killed off their original, underwhelming female lead, they said she'd gone on ahead of the rest of the team to gather pre-mission intelligence, in order to justify why she was there alone ahead of the others. Usually, though, one would assume that there's a difference between the assets who quietly gather information and the high-level operatives who tackle the really dangerous work.
That was a very memorable episode though, because for, as the reasons you said, it took our expectations of the M:I team being ultra-prepared and kind of used them against us- and having the agent be disavowed at the end of the ep was a killer blow- she wasn't *just* dead, she couldn't even be acknowledged.
Slightly OT, I have a vague memory of an M:I agent from the `88 series being brainwashed via sensory deprivation. Does this ring a bell? I may be mixing up my 80's shows, but that episode gave me nightmares and, to this day, still occasionally freaks me out. I'd kind of like to see it again to rob it of it's power.
Back in the day, when they killed off Terry Markwell's character, I was really struck by it, and it was the one bit I never forgot. But rewatching it more recently, I realized that Markwell was a virtual non-presence in the show up to that point. She was nice-looking (though not as much as I remembered) but an extremely mediocre actress, and she was rarely given anything to do; mostly she just tagged along with Jim Phelps and stood in the background. She was a total fifth wheel. (And giving her character the same name, Casey, as Linda Day George's character in the last two seasons of the original was a bizarre choice. When they brought back LDG, they had to retcon her name to Lisa Casey, even though Markwell's Casey Randall was long gone by that point.) By contrast, her replacement, Jane Badler as Shannon, was fantastic, one of the very best female leads in the series, despite the writers' tendency to make her a damsel in distress.
The only brainwashing plot I can find reference to in my blog reviews of the '88 series was in "The Assassin," a very, very loose remake of "Mindbend" from the original series. But it involves a neurochip and Clockwork Orange-style video conditioning, not sensory deprivation. And it's utterly, utterly terrible.
God, I wish I could remember what show that was from. All I remember was that it involved a woman waking up inside a sensory deprivation tank and saying things like: "I don't know where I am, where is this place?" and then, after leaving her in the tank for a period, a voice comes on and says it's there to look after her and get her out, and they sort of reprogram her in the tank, and when she gets out of the tank and meets the man behind the voice, she kind of grabs on to him for dear life. I think at some point it cut to the bad guys explaining to each other that the sensory deprivation made her lose all concept of time, so she was very vulnerable to accepting the voice as trustworthy. I *think* she broke free of the programming by the end of the episode (don't recall much else) but I'm not sure about that.
As a teenager I found the entire thing quite existentially terrifying.
[Just as an aside, I remember many years later there was an episode of 24 where they put blinders with flashing lights and headphones blaring static on a young man and when they took them off they said: "How long do you think you were wearing those?" and the man said: "I don't know, four hours?" and they said: "It was twenty minutes!" and when they tried to put them back on he freaked out, and frankly, so did I. Horrible.]
I thought Ghost Protocol had a terrific final action scene. It was hilariously choreographed and timed, reflecting Brad Bird's background in cartooning. It was reminiscent of those old Popeye or Tom & Jerry cartoons about characters chasing a baby through a construction site and trying to save it from disasters. I wouldn't say it was the best action sequence in the movie, but it's very impressive.
But action alone isn't what matters to me. What made M:I:III and GP work for me was the character stories, the personal element. What made the DePalma and Woo films fail for me was the superficiality of their characterizations and attempts at drama. M:I:III in particular did a great job of telling a human, emotional story that was served by the action beats. GP took a lighter tone, but still had a human story in its emphasis on the team's interrelationships, the first time that an M:I film has been a true team movie rather than The Adventures of Ethan Hunt and His Backup Singers. So what I want to know is, does Rogue Nation have a genuine emotional/dramatic core, or is it just whizbang action and wisecracks?
I didn't think Rogue Nation's villain was weak at all. Indeed, I thought the villain was the area with the most marked improvement over Ghost Protocol.
That's a good question. I think the emotional core in the film might be Ilsa Faust's dilemma. I don't think there's really one for Ethan Hunt. And not really one for the other other IMF members either.
Though the Syndicate head matches wits with Hunt and thankfully gets the best of him early on I don't know if its all that personal. Though I felt that the GP villain was pretty much a nonentity there was a bit of a personal thing there when he whips off the mask and has a stare down with Hunt in Dubai. From what I recall of RN I'm not even sure we got that. Though perhaps due to the ending, a great adversary could be in the offing.
Though I think the MI franchise has suffered from weak, or bland, villains throughout, with Phillip S. Hoffman's Davian being the most notable exception. He felt like a true threat. I can't get over them making Phelps the traitor perhaps to give Jon Voight his due. The potential was there for all of the villains, but it makes me wonder if Cruise doesn't want any of the villain actors stealing his spotlight.