Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg reunite as spies against the world in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation(henceforth known as MI:RN). I am not overly familiar with the Mission Impossible series, but I have seen Ghost Protocol and MI:3 so I generally knew what I was getting into when we went to watch this film. Ghost Protocol was a surprisingly good film and Deborah and I both were at least a little excited to see its sequel. Lets see how it stacks up. There will be light spoilers for the film below.
What It Does Well:
The thing that jumped out to me as great in this film was kind of surprising to me, but the sound editing was fantastic! Sound editing is one of those things that can subtly make or break a scene or a film. Bad sound editing can take the viewer out of a film while good sound editing can pull them further in. A lot of the things a film does are subconscious, but sound editing has to be one of the more difficult things to notice out of the blue. So what does good sound editing look (or rather sound) like?
There is a scene that takes place almost entirely underwater near the midway point of MI:RN. Now people have been doing underwater scenes for decades and generally have the same tricks to make the audience feel as if this is all occurring underwater. While MI:RN mostly follows the playbook, the way the sounds in the scene work feels just perfect to accent the tone of the scene. They oscillate between quiet and loud, which creates a natural rhythm to the scene that really drew me in. The vehicle scenes were also fantastically done, specifically the ones on the motorcycles, where the sound of the engines eclipsed everything else, bringing a sense of thrill to these scenes. I loved the way these scenes were pushed to their limits in terms of sound and I kind of hope to see this film get a nominations for sound editing. I may be wrong about this editing being great but I really liked it!
The other sound component, the soundtrack, is used to good effect here as well. The MI theme is instantly recognizable and brings a playful enjoyment to any scene it is in but is not overplayed. The film also knows when to cut back the soundtrack and become silent. Silence is an underrated tool that can really make a scene. I love it when silence is used in films correctly and in at least a few scenes it is done well here. Lastly, I wanted to reference the Opera scene which beautiful blends music with sound effects and silence. If you do watch this film, key your ear in to what’s going on, it’s really wonderful.
The cold open (or the first scene which jumps right into the action) is fantastic, and made all the better by knowing what Tom Cruise went through to perform the stunt. The shot of Cruise hanging onto to the side of the plane is iconic in its own right and sets the tone of the movie right away. Cruise’s performance is standard Cruise, but that’s a good thing. I feel like he is a good action star and brings his all into every movie he is in.
I like the spy thriller genre and I think this movie balances being overly action oriented and overly drama oriented well Or in other words the flow of the film is good, there is no nonstop action but there is also no tedious exposition weighing down the plot. Also, the comedy of Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner, and Alec Baldwin is pretty fun and enjoyable as a relief throughout the film.
What it Doesn’t Do Well:
The biggest problem of this film for me is the ultimate meaninglessness of it. While it is all good fun to see Cruise running around with a beautiful woman and his nerdy best friend saving the world from an underground organization of spies, the characters go virtually nowhere in terms of maturity or understanding of the world from beginning to end. The biggest growth we see in Cruise’s chracter is that he now can “beat” the big bad guy who he couldn’t before. He did not grow at all to do this, rather he just finally got the upper hand by allowing himself to be used. There is no lesson to be gained from watching this film. I’m not looking for the meaning of life in a Mission Impossible movie, but when a whole film occurs with nothing to really show for it from its main characters, I have to question why the film was even made. What is MI:RN trying to communicate about the human experience? Besides possibly “overcome your obstacles by out maneuvering them”, I can’t really see anything being communicated here on that level.
I also think overall the villain of the story could have been more fleshed out. While I get where he is coming from, knowing his beef with the world and why he wants to change it in an unethical way, that doesn’t mean I’m able to empathize with him. Ultimately this character is a pretty shallow bad guy, mostly feeling like just an obstacle for Ethan Hunt to overcome rather than a fleshed out character in his own right.
Lastly, I feel like the cathartic ending could have been spruced up a little bit more, it’s actually a little anti-climatic for me. I feel there are at least four scenes in MI:RN I would say are more intense than its climax and that really shouldn’t be the case in an action film. I feel like maybe the writer lost steam when trying to figure out exactly where they were trying to go to finish it all. Compared to the interesting locations used throughout the film, the final locale is a letdown and even worse, the location doesn’t add to the scene in the same way location added to the Opera scene or the underwater scene or the airplane scene. I would have liked to see a bigger ending for Ethan Hunt to finally catch his man.
Overall, MI:RN is at its best when it is dazzling us with its amazing set pieces, whether we’re swimming underwater, flying through the air, in a daring motorcycle chase, or just running through the streets of London. These scenes are pitch perfect in terms of tone and intensity, especially combined with the fantastic score, sound editing, and cinematography. But the well paced, story-oriented, scenes in between these set pieces leave much to be desired. Those well shot and well edited scenes would be so much more powerful if only I truly felt connected to who was in them and why they were there.
7/10
chungking jungle 