Movie review : Mission Impossible Fallout 2018

There are a lot of good things to say about this movie. I am glad it’s doing well. Mission: Impossible 6 has the crazy coincidence of being the same initials as MI6, British intelligence. It is a somewhat exhilarating, somewhat exhausting, very engaging movie to watch. The only movie I’ve ever seen that has its level of intensity is Harrison Ford’s Air Force One movie. There are two things that make it more intense: 1) There are almost no scenes which come between the action scenes. It’s usually one action scene leading to a brief conclusion and then going straight into the next. 2) More importantly, the 15-minute time pressure they have toward the end to prevent a nuclear poisoning of Central Asia’s water is DONE IN REAL TIME, and you feel every minute of the pain they feel as they’re fighting several battles at a time, including Tom Cruise doing unimaginably dangerous stunts from a helicopter. He is a madman for physical action and has only met his match with Harrison Ford among a person in his 50s. The climax felt unlike any other climax I’ve seen. It made me wide-eyed and stunned by the intensity more than anything. I think most action scenes in movies last up to 10 minutes, but this one pushes it farther, and doesn’t compress the time at all. They have a 15-minute countdown, which feels like it runs in real time. Predictably, they save the human race with only LESS THAN ONE SECOND to spare! Lots of movies have situations get solved at the very last moment, and it’s kind of corny now to me, because it’s become so predictable, but it’s still okay. Geostorm, The Great Wall, Rampage (new movie from this year of 2018), and Mission: Impossible 6 all have the situation get saved at the very last moment. The other corny thing about the formula for one of these Mission: Impossible movies is that at the end of a city-spanning chase scene, there’s always a pre-arranged rendezvous with the other heroes, even if there’s been no time to communicate about a rendezvous after getting separated!

The titular fallout refers to several things: nuclear fallout, the fallout if Ethan’s reputation is smeared by a phony dossier—interestingly coinciding with the famous unreliable dossier associated with Trump surveillance . . .—and falling out of a window and out of a helicopter. There’s even a fallout in the opening sequence of a fake set of walls. I think the opening sequence, involving a news broadcast, is extremely brilliant. It took me quite by surprise. I will not reveal spoilers!

The movie doesn’t fit in much humor, but it’s got so much style and so much refinement to its formula about double-crossings and facial disguises that the absence of much humor doesn’t really matter. The first half wasn’t very easy for me to follow plot-wise, but I was able to enjoy the staging of the action in each situation. I think the plot made more sense later on to me. I didn’t always know where the action was taking place—sometimes it was in London but I didn’t know that until reading the plot on Wikipedia.

I wish more movies today would be restrained with the graphic imagery like this one is. I don’t think most movies, unless there’s a specific purpose for the realism, need to have R-rated level of violence. Mission: Impossible 6 pulls off the entire thing in a PG-13 way without showing much blood. The most physically brutal of the fight scenes, an intense bathroom fight, keeps you the audience from seeing the destroyed face of the man whom Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill had to kill. (His face is covered with a cloth and then he’s put in the bathroom stall.) Much later, there are only a few gruesome moments of a badly damaged face in the climax. I appreciate the restraint on graphic imagery. PG-13 movies not only appeal to more people than R-rated ones, but they are more conducive to actually being able to enjoy an action scene. This movie will certainly instill a greater fear of loud gunshots into anyone watching it, and didn’t even need to get graphic with the imagery to do so.