Mission: Impossible

ethan hunt is the living manifestation of falling

III was overrated because it had PSH in the (fairly atypical) villain role

Gave it a bit more cred, even though he only has two big scenes iirc

Rogue Nation by a very slight amount over Ghost Protocol, Rebecca Ferguson tips the scales.

McQuarrie is an exceptionally good director now, it’s kind of amazing how good he’s wound up being at these films and even moreso considering his career was looking finished in the post-Way of the Gun/pre-Jack Reacher era. Valkyrie and The Tourist not exactly inspiring as the only credits to hold down the dozen years between.

Oh and I guess the "personal" angle was considered novel, even though it was a totally unnecessary route for the franchise to go down

MI:3 feels vv slight, feels like you could plug Jennifer Garner in there and make it an Alias reunion TV movie.

That does slightly neglect McQuarrie's role as fixer on almost every Cruise project, although we're obviously not privy to the specifics of that role

true I guess but it’s weird that he hasn’t gotten many opportunities from other places. Maybe he found Xenu?

Tom Cruise for James Bodn

Rogue Nation is my fav but havent seen 2 or 3

ethan hunt is the living manifestation of falling

― princess of hell (BradNelson), Tuesday, 24 July 2018 16:38 (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtaf at this shocking mistreatment of the greatest line ever uttered

Ethan Hunt's chronic inability to stay in vehicles or on top of buildings and concomitant hyper-facility wrt correcting for his incessant falling and flailing is kind of like that thing where in gym class I was amazing at dodging the ball and was always the last one left on my team but couldn't actually hit anyone with a dodgeball if my life depended on it.

I remember liking the De Palma one at the time, despite not remembering anything much about it now beyond the pair of opening and closing set pieces.

I remember disliking the Abrams at the time, even though I remember even less about it now. It's funny to hear that people overrated it on the basis of Hoffman's performance, because I recall him being under-utilized.

The Bird film is the best pure action movie I've seen in decades--a statement that would probably carry more weight if I watched more current action flicks. Beautiful, elegant, and inventive--the antithesis of the pummelling Michael Bay style that largely keeps me away from the genre these days.

Haven't seen the others. Is there any real continuity to the series, or are they basically Bond films: separate adventure stories with the occasional callbacks to characters and incidents from prior entries?

There are some throughlines in the recent ones, which apparently carry through in a fairly pronounced way in the new one.

The first three are basically standalone films more in the traditional Bond sense, zero callbacks to the other films unless you count the carryover presence of Ving Rhames. The Hunt character is completely different in each film too. Going from ice cold agent to hot blooded loverman action guy to put upon domesticated Abrams hero.

The last two and presumably the new one have more carryover and seem more consistent. It’s virtually a separate trilogy and a total reboot.

I think PSH being underutilized added to it. That's the one thing Abrams does OK if he sticks to it -- having villains that seem genuinely intimidating as long as he doesn't have them on the screen too long. He overplays it half the time!

So uh the Abrams movie is basically him doing a more concise first season of Alias, can anyone really disagree

I'm really mixed on whether I think having the wife character (played by Michelle Monaghan) reappear is a good idea. Depends on how they play it, but I thought the somewhat write-off in Ghost Protocol was a good idea but, at the same time, the reveal felt like dead weight in the plot

oh man, from the wikipedia article on MI3, after they explain the revolving door of directors/writers they went through:

After a dispute over the film's tone, Carnahan quit in July 2004. Tom Cruise then called J. J. Abrams, offering the directorial role for the film after having binge-watched the first two seasons of Alias.

Had no idea Abrams directed all of those episodes. Impressive stamina, m'man.

oh we spoiling now cool

she's in the trailer...

my issue with mi3 is that it's ugly as sin

man a Joe Carnahan M:I would have been...something.

Carnahan regrets that cinemagoers never got to see his version.

He says, “Were we going to do something that would have kicked the s**t out of the movie they wound up doing?

“Absolutely. I’m not even going to shy away from that. I know the film we made was going to be better because I thought it was important. And the movie we were making was about private military and what’s going on in Africa.

“I had Kenneth Branagh playing a guy who’s based on Timothy McVeigh. And I think the cast that we had–Ken, Carrie-Anne Moss, Scarlett Johansson–that’s the biggest heartbreak for me because I saw how amazing they would have been.

“If you would have seen Carrie-Anne Moss move with a handgun after a month and a half, it would have blown your mind.

“And we had flat-out the two best mask reveals in the franchise history. Like those mask pulls dealt with major plot stuff. They weren’t just these cartoony things.”

wtaf at this shocking mistreatment of the greatest line ever uttered

― dele alli my bookmarks (darraghmac), Tuesday, July 24, 2018 9:59 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

deems i'm explicitly on this board to troll you, get used to it

my issue with mi3 is that it's ugly as sin

The budget on that thing was $150 mil and it looks like trash.

that description of the hypothetical Carnahan one sounds equal parts amazing and horrific

MI2 has major issues but at least it looks major-scale.

it's especially noticeable when you're watching all of them bc the rest of the movies are p beautiful and have outstanding individual shots (the scene of kristin scott thomas wandering through the blue fog in the first one knocked me out recently and i've seen that movie a million times bc i was obsessed with it as a kid.) mi3 has the color palette of quake 1

the whole dinner party scene intro might actually be an alias episode with the dialogue hastily rewritten

fuck I might have to rewatch some of these now. I still haven't seen the fifth one

Rogue Nation is ugly as hell, too!

xp imagine the fourth movie, only with the rhythm of Jack Reacher and then throw a group trying to be SPECTRE into the MI landscape, only done fairly minimally

i still have to rewatch that one but i'm pretty sure i disagree (possibly i am so dumbstruck by the visuals in the fallout trailers that my memory has totally visually redesigned rogue nation) xp

I'm loathe to compare anything to the really overwrought Bond movies of late, but I swear the villain of Rogue Nation was shown footage of Mr. White from the Bond films and told "deliver lines kind of like that"

Rogue Nation looks great. It’s a little more visually close-quarters than Ghost Protocol and doesn’t rise to it but it’s p thrilling aesthetically nonetheless.

https://okinawaassault.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/vlcsnap-134960.png

Is PSH the only memorable villain in these movies? I feel like it's their persistent weakspot.

first twenty minutes of m:i actually kinda scared the shit out of me when i was a kid, especially emilio estevez's death

the fluctuation between czernay and voight as the antagonist in it is actually pretty solid villainy imo

Main fail for me in Ghost Protocol is the lovely yet decidedly terrible Paula Patton.
Rewatched RN two nights ago and it just looked like a monochrome sludge and pretty much all of it in medium shots.

Czerny was super good playing those icy govt bureaucrats. See also: Clear and Present Danger.

cobalt in ghost protocol is kind of a non-entity but the real villain in that film is nuclear annihilation

PSH coasts in MI3. He’s pretty memorable but also very much the type of bad guy who lasts on episode of a TV show. Which is what that movie felt like anyway.

Most memorable villains probably the three headed monster of Voight/Redgrave/Reno in the first one.

hard for me to think of max as a villain

i love the max callback in ghost protocol, where hunt requests a meeting with an arms dealer and they make him wear the same hood

oh i guess she is a villain bc she wants that list of deep-cover operatives but idk she's so much fun, redgrave rules in that movie

Love how she’s totally into Ethan once she thinks he’s legit, drops the steel and turns on the flirting.

imo they should redeem Monaghan's thankless presence in these movies by making her the baddie in the next one (esp since he more or less inducts her into the killing game in MI:III)

I'd actually be all-in for the "Ethan, we don't do things that way!" junk in the trailers be a foreshadowing of the character actually cracking and Cruise's character cracks and is straight-up shooting people in the face for half the movie. I mean, they won't, buuuut....

Is PSH the only memorable villain in these movies? I feel like it's their persistent weakspot.

― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Tuesday, 24 July 2018 18:14 (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no way sean harris pwns

minority report

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/mission-impossible-fallout

http://www.keithuhlich.com/2018/07/a-little-more-on-mission-impossible-fallout.html