Dune Pod: Mission Impossible: Fallout
Just writing down some rough thoughts on Mission Impossible: Fallout, the movie for this week’s Dune Pod.
Overall, watching this movie — the sixth Mission Impossible movie — ended up feeling very meta. First, watching a huge Hollywood blockbuster during the pandemic makes me long for travel and for going to the movies. But also, the MI movies are less narrative films and more a series of impossible challenges the filmmakers gave themselves in a Brewster’s Millions style gambit to spend $170M.
For example, one of the set pieces of the film is a HALO jump where Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill jump out of a plane at 25,000 feet and land on the Grand Palais in Paris. Even from a story perspective this doesn’t make any sense; turns out you can just walk into the Grand Palais, you don’t need to HALO jump onto it. But a big deal is made in the promotion of the movie about how Tom Cruise actually did HALO jump to get this shot and how they only had three minutes of sunset each day to get the shot and how he had to fly within three feet of the camera man to get the closeup and so on and so on.
To get the shot they build an entirely new wind tunnel turbine training facility (unclear why existing wind tunnels were insufficient.) And they got the UAE military to supply a C-17 for the jumps, performed in Abu Dhabi. Which is a weird point because they then take the footage they shot in the UAE and composite in Paris (and a thunderstorm) into the final sequence. So they make an entirely synthetic shot out of something that they went to great pains to shoot as “realistically” as possible. Honestly, the only way it makes sense to me is if the massive amounts of money spent in the UAE and in constructing the wind turbine was part of money laundering scheme.
But the real explanation is likely that “Tom Cruise wanted to jump out of the plane.” Because the MI movies are less about a superspy named Ethan Hunt who routinely saves the world and more a canvas for superstar Tom Cruise to engage in actually life threatening and logistically complicated shenanigans.
But regardless, the climax takes place on Preikestolen, the Preacher’s Pulpit in Norway which I was happy to see again and gave me the push to find some of my own photos from the Lysefjord.
