Title of new "Mission: Impossible" movie announced
- Thread starter JacksonArcher
- Start date
They're Paramount, so they can take on Megatron, or the Ark of the Covenant, or Axel Foley, or the Enterprise in the fifth movie.
"Good morning, Mr. Hunt. The person you see here is Megatron, ruthless leader of the cybernetic terrorist organization known as the Decepticons. Megatron is being challenged for control of the organization by his lieutenant, Starscream, a highly dangerous and erratic individual. If Starscream should gain control, the Secretary feels the Decepticons will become far more unstable and unpredictable. Starscream has blackmailed this man, Axel Foley, a 26-year veteran of the Beverly Hills police, into helping him steal the powerful Ark of the Covenant from a secret government warehouse so he can use it to overthrow Megatron. Foley will deliver the Ark to Starscream right under Megatron's nose during a gambling cruise aboard this vessel, the USS Enterprise. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to recover the Ark, destroy the blackmail material on Foley, and expose Starscream's plans to Megatron, without letting the crew of the Enterprise become aware of the Ark's existence. As always, should you or any of your IM force be caught or disintegrated, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of this mashup. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Ji -- uh, Ethan.
"Oh, and if you can get Maggie Q in that red dress again, there's a commendation in it for you."
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This. Which is really frustrating as a faithful, big-screen big-budget version would work brilliantly done right.
^I'm not sure a big-budget version would be the right way to go. What intrigued me about the original M:I concept was that it played like a really, really off-the-books covert mission. Think about what the pilot episode established. A guy gets a secret message telling him "Welcome back" (suggesting he's a retired intelligence agent returning to the game) and offering him a mission -- offering him, not ordering him ("if you choose to accept it"). He's told he'll have full discretion as to his methods and team members (a line left out in the rest of the series). He's told that if his team is caught, the government will deny knowing anything about them and just leave them out in the cold -- complete deniability. He recruits a team of people who aren't professional agents -- an actor, a model, an engineer, a circus strongman, and in the pilot, a safecracker -- and meets with them in his apartment, not in any sort of government office, to plan out the scheme. What that suggests is that this is an unofficial operation put together for a mission so sensitive and dangerous that the government can't officially have anything to do with it at all. So "the Secretary" (of Defense, probably) makes clandestine contact with a former colleague and asks him to use his expertise in an unofficial capacity to undertake this impossible mission.
I think that's a fascinating concept, and one that was never satisfactorily developed. As the show went on, more and more we saw that the IMF did, in fact, have abundant support from the federal government and local officials, and in the '88 revival series and especially the movies, it was blatantly a subdivision of the CIA. In the third movie, we even saw the team operating out of an office in CIA headquarters and answering directly to its head. Which makes the whole secret message drop and the lines about "should you choose to accept it" and "the Secretary will disavow" totally meaningless.
So I'd love to see an M:I reboot that builds on the potential implicit in the original setup, focuses on the idea of the IMF as an unofficial, garage-band operation. I'd like to see an origin story explaining who Briggs/Phelps/whoever is, where he came from, how he ended up in this position, how he got the idea of recruiting amateurs to help out with an off-the-books spy mission. And why the team members are willing to undertake such a mission. There's a lot of potential there, and I think it would be better explored in a lower-budget, more character-focused film. I've had enough of the blockbuster approach.
I think that's a fascinating concept, and one that was never satisfactorily developed. As the show went on, more and more we saw that the IMF did, in fact, have abundant support from the federal government and local officials, and in the '88 revival series and especially the movies, it was blatantly a subdivision of the CIA. In the third movie, we even saw the team operating out of an office in CIA headquarters and answering directly to its head. Which makes the whole secret message drop and the lines about "should you choose to accept it" and "the Secretary will disavow" totally meaningless.
So I'd love to see an M:I reboot that builds on the potential implicit in the original setup, focuses on the idea of the IMF as an unofficial, garage-band operation. I'd like to see an origin story explaining who Briggs/Phelps/whoever is, where he came from, how he ended up in this position, how he got the idea of recruiting amateurs to help out with an off-the-books spy mission. And why the team members are willing to undertake such a mission. There's a lot of potential there, and I think it would be better explored in a lower-budget, more character-focused film. I've had enough of the blockbuster approach.
Part of the problem is people are starting to look down upon "numbered sequels" because so many of them have been crap, no matter the franchise. So you end up with the numbering being abandoned like Trek did, or you get these subtitled titles to try and set them apart from what came before (IIRC Mission Impossible III didn't exactly set the world on fire).
Personally, I have no interest in the franchise. I was excited when the first movie was announced but then it ended up being a Tom Cruise movie, ignoring the fact what made Mission Impossible work was the fact it was a team effort with no one character or actor dominating. And the whole bit about Phelps being a traitor (Peter Graves reportedly was offered the part, saw that, and told them to f-off) was a real middle finger to the fans. Granted, it didn't matter because most its target audience had no idea there was ever a TV show (as I found out when I started looking for the TV series DVDs at the shops and kept being offered the movies, followed by blank stares when I said, no, the TV series.).
Although I don't plan to double-dip on the 7 box sets I've purchased over the last 5 years, maybe the release of MI4 will spark a Blu-Ray reissue of the original series. The prints (from the evidence of the DVD sets) look great and would make the transition well, I think.
Alex
Ahh, there's the recency illusion again, thinking people are just "starting" to hold an attitude that's been around for a long time. Mocking numbered sequels has been part of the culture for decades. For instance, the gag about Jaws 19 in Back to the Future Part II, a film that came out 21 years ago (1989). Also in '89 (or maybe '90) Alien Nation, a show set in the near future of 1997, had a character refer in turn to having seen Back to the Future Part VI and saying it wasn't very good. (Although, unlike most not-recent-at-all "recent" trends, this one doesn't stretch back too far, since numbered sequels didn't really catch on until the '70s.)
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten Rocky XXXVIII. Like Jaws 19, that's from a numbered sequel itself, Airplane II: The Sequel from 1982, predating my examples by years. Thanks for bolstering my case for me! 
Looks like Ving Rhames might not be appearing in this movie after all. You know how actors usually get pay increases with sequels or the longer a TV show runs (which is how someone like Noah Wylie can make a lot of money on ER but not even sniff a fraction of that salary doing any other projects)? It's a number Rhames was quoted as saying, but if $7.7 million is what he's actually demanding, I don't see why they would give it to him.
Not sure what other movies he's be getting $3 million for (definitely not for the straight-to-DVD Death Race 2). Even Cruise is taking a pay cut from Mission: Impossible III.
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Will the 5th and 6th movies be based mostly in the UK?
Okay, if Rhames doesn't come back, maybe they can offer Maggie Q more money and get her to come back.
Re Rhames: What a dumbass. Doesn't he think that in a movie where Tom feckin' Cruise is taking a paycut, maybe he ought to set his sights a bit lower? I mean $3m is still a lot of money, considering that his presence or absence in the movie is unlikely to change its intake at the box office.
Unless, of course, he has a particularly large family.
Unless, of course, he has a particularly large family.
His IMDb bio says that he and his wife have three children. Largish, but not "particularly large," I guess.
Though being Ving Rhames, his children are all probably large.
Then again, I haven't seen any of the Bourne movies yet and I can never figure out which one is which (without looking it up, of course).
^Well, I don't know the order of the Sherlock Holmes stories by heart, but how boring would it be if they were called "Sherlock Holmes 2," "Sherlock Holmes 3," etc. instead of "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League," etc.? A good title is an important part of the creative process, and of the promotional process. It's the introduction to your story, and it's worth putting some care into the first impression. Numbered-sequel titles are just lazy and soulless.
