2023 – Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One
I was actually really surprised by the visual effects in this movie, and in a good way. I didn’t want to watch this movie until I had seen all the Mission: Impossible movies. So I went back to the beginning and watched them all. Of course, this is the seventh movie in the franchise so by the time I got here, I was a little Mission Impossible’d out. And after binging all seven films, I can say that it was pretty cool to watch the overall stories, the characters who came and went, the progression of the plot-lines, and the improvements and complexities of the visuals in the action sequences and the stunts. And since stunts do not have their own category at the Academy Awards, they get to be part of the visual effects category.
It is fair to say that practical effects and stunts, combined with CGI enhancements has sort-of become what the Mission Impossible films are known for. The star of the franchise, Tom Cruise, prefers to do most of his own stunts, and the fans love him for it. In this film, the big one was where he rides a motorcycle off a cliff, and then skydives away from the mountain. A VFX video I watched showed how he actually drove the cycle up a wide ramp in a studio, which was later replaced with a mountain cliff, but that made the physical stunt no less real. It was pretty darn impressive, and thrilling to watch! Same with the requisite car chase scene.
But there were two sequences in the movie that I liked just as much. First was near the beginning of the movie that took place in the Arabian Desert. An incredible gun fight in the middle of a massive sandstorm looked visually stunning. Of course most of the flying dust and sand was digital, but you wouldn’t know it. It looked fantastic, and would have been impossible to film in a real storm.
The second was the train crash. The bridge has been blown upThe automatic breaks have been slowing the train down, but it isn’t enough. Cruise and his co-star, Hayley Atwell, have to make their way back through several cars before they go over the edge of the destroyed bridge, and fall into the chasm. There is the coal car, the kitchen car, and finally a lounge, complete with a falling piano that had to be dodged, and they did that thing which I have seen in other films, even beyond the Mission Impossible franchise. They keep the camera inside the crashing vehicle, whether it is a rolling car or train, and we get to watch gravity take a back seat. We see the actors floating amid the dirt and debris, bumping into the walls and ceiling of the cabin. It is pretty cool!
This train sequence was worth the Oscar nomination alone, but the seamless CGI compositing, and the digital scene extensions, enhanced the film, even in the few scenes that were not intense action sequences. The fight on top of the speeding train was pretty awesome, too, especially in the tunnel. Pure cinematic magic!