March 25, 2025
Note: I started writing this review on July 30, 2023, just a week after returning from Zürich, but I forgot to complete it. I rediscovered it earlier today while scrolling through my blog post drafts folder. I hadn't watched or thought about the movie since then (although I do occasionally listen to the soundtrack album), so I rewatched it earlier today to refresh my memory before I began writing. My initial reaction to the movie was a bit critical (maybe this is why I held off on publishing it), but many of my thoughts about the movie have softened over the past two years. I've tried to both retain the original spirit of the post and finish/lightly extrapolate any incomplete thoughts I had sketched at the time, while also adding my current perspective where appropriate/relevant.
On Wednesday, I was bored and decided to watch a matinee showing of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. We live about fifteen minutes away from the theater, so I booked the tickets for a 1510 showing at 1455 and hopped in the car.
I reached the theater just as they were finishing the Regal pre-flight video. Previews, in no specific order: The Equalizer 3, Dune: Part Two, The Last Voyage of the Demeter (which is really Dracula), Next Goal Wins, Killers of the Flower Moon, Bob Marley: One Love. I might have missed one or two. All were relatively interesting, but none was exceptional, and I doubt I'll see any of them regardless. By personal policy, I still have to read Dune before watching the first movie. The final promo was the Regal ad with a bunch of random movie quotes nonsensically mixed together. Then the movie started (and finished, with no intermissions).
The movie opens with the submarine scene (Sevastopol), introducing us to our rogue AI and the two keys. I won't spell out the obvious Russian sub reference. The sub explodes and we see the key around the captain's neck beneath the ice before we move to the next scene, where Ethan receives his mission briefing from a new IMF agent. [I don't think the new agent reappears in this movie and I have no idea who he is, but maybe he will return in the sequel.] Ethan opens the package, and Kittridge's distinct voice adds some background about the key as well as how Ethan was initially roped into the IMF. Kittridge tells Ethan about a bounty on Ilsa and how to find her to obtain the key.
We move to the desert as Ethan works to intercept Ilsa's bounty hunters. He converges on her position while she fends off a horde of attackers. After her (obvious) fake death, we cut to a intelligence meeting where the Director of National Intelligence and others discuss the Entity and its implications for the intelligence community and society. Kittridge is formally introduced and talks about the keys and Ilsa before revealing the existence of the IMF to the previously in-the-dark DNI. Concurrently, there's an obviously telegraphed sequence (if you're familiar with these movies) of someone (who is obviously Ethan wearing a mask) making their way into the intelligence meeting. The mystery character dons a gas mask and hands another to Kittridge before throwing three smoke bombs and revealing himself to indeed be Ethan.
With the DNI's security detail quickly approaching, Kittridge asks Ethan how he's going to escape. I particularly enjoyed Ethan's facial expression as he wears the Kittridge mask, right before he shoots the real Kittridge with a tranquilizer dart and the opening credits roll.
My initial reaction in 2023: "When I watched the movie, I was a bit unimpressed with the pre-credits sequence. Now as I retell it, it's more interesting than I thought, but I still don't think it wins any awards. The best I can describe is that it was not "Mission: Impossible"-y enough. It was a little too straightforward, all of the fakeouts but the final one were telegraphed or obvious, there were no stunts, and there was too much else going on."
I rewatched all twenty-eight minutes of the pre-credits sequence (wow, so long!) and my opinion has continued to soften, but I still believe there were too many slow-developing moving pieces. The one twist that wasn't entirely predictable, Ethan putting on the Kittridge mask, is unexpected but also irrelevant. Ethan's mission briefing from Kittridge is informative in the typical M:I style, although maybe it dumps too much too early. That scene also introduces an ultimately irrelevant character in the new IMF agent. They could have borrowed from the previous movie and condensed that interaction.
Much of what I enjoy about the franchise is captured by the other movies' pre-credits sequences, all of which introduce Ethan, the IMF, a single important plot point, a villain, or multiple of these but not too many. Each successive one included some unique element, whether it be Evil Ethan or a prison break or an airplane or a special twist on the fake-room-in-a-box from the original movie. I felt like much of this one was standard content that could fit in with the rest of the movie. Maybe the scenes in the desert and with the DNI could have been trimmed.
The submarine scene is very cool, and the soundtrack sets the mood well: this scene stands on its own.
The first scene after the credits is at the airport. I enjoyed the teamwork and banter between Luther and Benji before and while they try to figure out what's going on with the riddle bomb. The baggage facility set evoked the water tank facility in the USS Enterprise when Kirk and Scotty beam back from Delta Vega and Scotty gets stuck in the water tubes, too.
The cut to the airport immediately after the credits is clean. I also liked the parallel introductions of the military team and Gabriel. This scene does a great job interleaving the various groups of people until they ultimately converge upon one another.
Finally, as is typical for this franchise, the soundtrack is evocative: the score in this section rotates among a set of patterns, effectively conveying intrigue, anticipation, building intensity, action, and danger as the story calls for each. [I was quite excited for the soundtrack, especially since I had been listening to the album non-stop in the two weeks between its release and my viewing.]
[My initial thoughts immediately after watching the movie were mostly about the pre-credits scenes, my takeaways from the movie, and things unrelated to the movie itself. I didn't write down too many thoughts about the middle or end of the movie, because I was too caught up in identifying which elements from previous movies each scene reminded me of. No one really needs my play-by-play reconstruction from my rewatch, so I'll just skip ahead. Also the main reason I dug up this blog post was to publish its first and last sections.]
I was a bit disappointed by what I found to be a cookie-cutter, Frankenstein-esque, paint-by-numbers Mission: Impossible movie. It did seemed like they were constructing the movie by pulling bits and pieces from each of the previous movies. Maybe I should revise my claim that it was not "Mission: Impossible"-y enough to be that it was too "Mission: Impossible"-y but not distinct enough from the previous editions. I could write an entire post highlighting every scene or plot point in a previous movie that this one borrowed from. I would have liked to see them come up with new takes on the old tricks rather than simply reheating them.
There were seven plot points after the credits: airport, Rome, regroup, Venice, fight, regroup, train. The set pieces were generally exciting (although the motorcycle jump was underwhelming), and most scenes were well-paced on their own, although some did run a bit long in the overall storyline. Considering that the runtime was over two and a half hours, they could have been more judicious about tightening it up.
I was also disappointed by the character balancing in this movie. There was less of Luther and Benji later on, so they were deprived of characteristic opportunities to shine in the final act. They explicitly wrote out Luther, and Benji was relegated to key holder and driver in the final scene. Some of the other movies at least give Benji, Luther, and other IMF members an interesting sideplot, and part of the fun in these movies is watching the core team showing off their own competency.
Also, Ilsa's death seemed underwhelming. Everything from the previous paragraph applies here.
[I learned earlier today that they've ditched the Part One subtitle and are rebranding the next movie as "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning," so this is technically no longer a two-part movie.]
I'll end with some positives.
This was the first time in recent memory in which I left a movie theater and didn't feel like my brain was overstimulated or overloaded. Theaters are always loud and I usually prefer to listen to movies or soundtracks on my headphones and keep the volume low, and the massive screens usually give me a bit of a headache, so the theater seemed much better calibrated to my auditory and visual preferences this time around. Though perhaps this was just the byproduct of having spent five months in the bustling metroplex of Zurich.
Having traveled across central Europe this past semester, I felt that I could relate to the setting of the movie much better. In particular, specific sights in Rome were memorable and I enjoyed watching the car chase through Italy and remembering the tiny roads and tiny cars. Also, having ridden in a dining car with a similar blue coat of paint in eastern Switzerland only a couple weeks ago, and having grown obsessed with trains over the course of my exchange stay, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the train sequence, thinking about the railway routes, etc.
I noticed that the most useful skills in this movie for Ethan Hunt were catching the train/plane, climbing, and pull-ups. Incidentally, these were the skills I developed the most in Zurich.