News Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 TRAILER released
- Thread starter jbohn
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Saw this last night and was grinning the whole way through. I have no history with the series, but thought it was one really fun movie with great stunts. If anything, I feel since Bond won't be coming back for a while, this is taking care of that itch. By the end of it, I felt satisfied and already plan on seeing part 2.
Does this mean you haven't seen the previous movies? If so, and you liked this one, I highly recommend you watch the rest of the movie series, as you'll probably like those, too. Well, maybe you can skip the second movie, that one's aged horribly, but the other six movies are great.
I'd agree about the second (although it didn't just age horribly but was bad to begin with), but I didn't care for the first film either. I find it deeply flawed, with unlikeable characters and plot logic that falls apart if you think about it, and it alienated fans of the classic series with its treatment of a legacy character (although the recent movies seem to have clarified the films as a reboot continuity rather than a sequel to the TV show). But everything from III onward has been terrific. The first two are entirely different beasts from one another and from the later films.
Yeah, I haven't seen any of the other ones for some reason. This was the first one that really interested me and hit all the right notes. It was fun and funny too. I do want to see some of the others, even just to see the evolution of the series, but they all seem to be on services I don't have.
According to the Canadian version of Just Watch, the movies are free to watch on Paramount+ or Pluto TV (which has ads). 1, 2, 5, 6 are also on Club Illico.
Hard disagree regarding the first one. After revisiting it a couple of times over the years I've noticed how it very much set up the formula that the series has followed from III onward, whether it be Ethan and his team being hunted by the US government, using the heist-like missions that made up the TV series (as in one per episode) into mini-missions inside the larger narrative of the movie, and, of course, the spectacular stunts.
Yeah, I'm not subscribed to those at the moment.
Pluto TV is free, thus the ads.
Well, sure, but I mean in terms of directorial style. Back when there were only three movies, M:I didn't feel like a film series, but like three unrelated movies that just happened to have a title and two characters in common (and one of those characters was barely in the second). They had more to do with their individual directors' styles than they had to do with each other. The first film was a typical Brian DePalma paranoid thriller; the second film was a typical John Woo action spectacle; and the third film, directed by J.J. Abrams, was basically Alias: The Movie. Which is understandable, since there were 4 years between the first and second films and 6 years between the second and third, and they were all from different creative teams.
Now, Ghost Protocol continued this to an extent, with Brad Bird's directorial style quite evident; the film had the same terrifically clever writing, pacing, and intricate action-gag construction as his animated films. But it was also the first film to be from basically the same creative team as the previous one, with Abrams's Bad Robot becoming the regular producers of the series. In keeping with that, it was the first film to bring back any characters besides Ethan and Luther, and the first film to reference any continuity from any previous film. Since then, the inter-film continuity has increased, and the number of series-regular characters has increased with each film. So the films of the Abrams/Bad Robot era feel more like an actual series than the first two. Although it's true that the past few McQuarrie films have made increasing references to the first film, even bringing back Henry Czerny in the latest one.
The first two films also stand apart for me because they're much weaker at characterization. As I often say, Ethan Hunt got more character development in the first 4 minutes of the third film than in the previous 4 hours of the series. In the first film, all we basically learn about Ethan is that he's sleeping with his friend's wife and he gets really mad when his teammates are killed. In the second film, he has even less personality. It wasn't until III that he felt like an actual person.
As for the films' use of the TV heist/sting format, it's varied from film to film. The first film used the TV format in its first act, but only to set it up for a complete deconstruction and swerve to a different genre entirely, from caper procedural to paranoid action thriller. The second film pays lip service to the TV format but is more of a solo action film than a team caper like the show, with Ethan's two teammates reduced to a minor role; Dougray Scott's villain actually uses more IMF-style tactics than Ethan does.
In the third film, we get one isolated set piece that emulates the show, but the rest is more like Alias. It particularly annoys me that in the flashbacks to the IMF academy, the training we see consists exclusively of combat and gunplay, without a trace of the intricate deceptions and roleplaying and gadgetry that defined the IMF in the series. (Really, the original TV series's conception was that they weren't professional agents at all, just skilled civilians recruited as unofficial, deniable agents.)
To me, Ghost Protocol is the only film that really feels like it captures the spirit of the TV series, committing to it throughout rather than just paying lip service in a set piece. It’s the most team-driven of the movies, and the first that didn’t have a romantic subplot per se for Hunt, focusing more on the progression of the mission as in the show. The films' large, bureaucratic IMF is kept mostly off-camera, feeling more like the series. (Okay, we actually met “the Secretary,” a major subversion of the show’s conventions, but it was brief.) It’s a good compromise between the established realities of the movie universe and the flavor and approach of the show.
Rogue Nation reverts to being driven by big action, though. The sequence with the Prime Minister and Attlee comes closest to an IMF-style con game, and the infiltration of the Casablanca vault has a touch of it (since it’s basically a variation on the classic IMF tactic of inserting fake credentials for a team member into the target’s records). But mostly it’s action over calculating schemes and deceptions, and Ethan and the team spend too much time improvising rather than playing out intricate chess games plotted in advance. The government committee even calls Ethan’s methods “indistinguishable from luck,” which is anathema to the IMF of the TV series, wherein every move was calculated from the start and very little was ever left to chance. The Syndicate is said to be an “anti-IMF,” but its methods seem to consist mainly of snipers and bombs and the like.
Fallout was somewhat better, with a strong IMF-style caper before the titles (the old "make the mark think his plan has already succeeded so he doesn't have to keep the secret" trick) and some more deceptions here and there afterward, but it's still driven more by action overall.
Randomly dropping in here...but it blows my mind that Oppenheimer is just a million dollars behind Mission Impossible, despite opening a week after MI....and just that it is Oppenheimer (as opposed to MI).
Is MI worth seeing on the big screen??
Is MI worth seeing on the big screen??
Yes, it certainly is.
As for Oppenheimer vs MI, the Barbenheimer hype and Oppenheimer having every single IMAX screen probably has a lot to do with it. MI might have had bad timing, considering they knew about the Oppenheimer IMAX deal well in advance, they maybe should have waited another month to release in August. Anyway, I've seen speculation that MI might return to IMAX once Oppenheimer had its run, so there still might be some gas in MI's tank.
Also, internationally, MI is way ahead of Oppenheimer.
I saw both and I personally had a better time with MI, and had too many issues with Oppenheimer for it to be a hit with me. MI is so far my favourite of the summer.
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Did you see that scene with two identical cats walking by?
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This may be completely personal to me, but I don't think it helps a movie that isn't Harry Potter or Avengers to have a "Part 1," in its title as it implies the audience is paying exorbitant prices for half a movie.
I think it would be worse for people that don't follow online news about movies to go in and only realize at the end that they need to see a second movie to close the story. That would have greated bad vibes and by announcing that these two movies would finish the series as a whole ( Cruise is 61 and would still leave me in the dust on the 100 m dash but he's getting up there).
Seen it yesterday and they really have perfected the formula - you can think about Cruise what you want but he makes damn entertaining movies, especially with the MI franchise and i really enjoyed it for what it is. Will definitely watch the second part to see how they cap off the entire thing - if they have real balls they'll kill off the entire team bit by bit and in the finale kill off Hunt too but not before he completes the mission and saves the world again.
I've thought for years now that they should promote Ethan Hunt to the "Secretary" role and have Ilsa Faust take over as the action lead. It seems the obvious route to keep the series going. No reason it can't live beyond Ethan Hunt, given that he was a replacement character to begin with (and given that the M:I TV series had two different leads and a frequently changing cast).
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