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M:I Ghost Protocol (2011)
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Dir. Brad Bird, 2011.
I'd pretty much given up on the M:I movie franchise, but it seems that Hollywood hasn't, and, happily for its continued prospects, this is probably the best of the lot since the first one. The gadgets are cool (and not perfect), and the action scenes are great--I especially liked the very grounding focus on footchases and mistakes, which fits with what character arcs there are in the movie, particularly between Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, looking older but still good) and Jeremy Renner's character, Brandt, who is damn smooth. Also damn good looking, particularly when he is being angsty. I could get used to seeing more of him (and indeed, I won't lie, he's a big part of why I dragged my dad to the movie in the first place). The other agents were good, particularly Simon Pegg, and as well as being intelligently written the script also has a welcome dose of humor, which serves to break up the near-constant action.
They might as well have subtitled this one Mission: Impossible - Emerging Economies, because the action veers from Budapest to Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai, giving us a decent amount of eyecandy along the way. I didn't have![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marina to tell me whether the actors were actually speaking Russian, though the switch from English to Russian and back was handled plausibly in script, and in the end I thought the movie was actually fairly non-Russophobic for a Hollywood outing, if you set the entire "Russia has loose nukes!" premise of the plot aside. Also, the villain is a former Swedish special forces member turned nuclear theorist! I also appreciated that Hunt's phantasmic wife was no longer being actively put in threat of danger by the villain, and that the character who was motivated by revenge for a loved one's death was a woman of color. And unlike M:I 3, with that stupid "rabbit's foot" McGuffin malarkey, the stakes were comprehensible. This is one of the things I think is important in movies like this, actually, can you tell?
What I actually find most interesting, on a sort of meta-cinematic level, is the question of just why Hollywood is suddenly obsessed (again) with nuclear war. It's the central plot device of two major movies this year (XM:FC and M:I 4), and I just don't quite get it. Something like Goldeneye, that made a lot of sense (though it wasn't even about nuclear weapons, but EMP) for its time and place, but why are we suddenly worried about nuclear war and nuclear terrorism so much again? Did I miss a general societal memo somewhere?
I'd pretty much given up on the M:I movie franchise, but it seems that Hollywood hasn't, and, happily for its continued prospects, this is probably the best of the lot since the first one. The gadgets are cool (and not perfect), and the action scenes are great--I especially liked the very grounding focus on footchases and mistakes, which fits with what character arcs there are in the movie, particularly between Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, looking older but still good) and Jeremy Renner's character, Brandt, who is damn smooth. Also damn good looking, particularly when he is being angsty. I could get used to seeing more of him (and indeed, I won't lie, he's a big part of why I dragged my dad to the movie in the first place). The other agents were good, particularly Simon Pegg, and as well as being intelligently written the script also has a welcome dose of humor, which serves to break up the near-constant action.
They might as well have subtitled this one Mission: Impossible - Emerging Economies, because the action veers from Budapest to Moscow to Dubai to Mumbai, giving us a decent amount of eyecandy along the way. I didn't have
marina to tell me whether the actors were actually speaking Russian, though the switch from English to Russian and back was handled plausibly in script, and in the end I thought the movie was actually fairly non-Russophobic for a Hollywood outing, if you set the entire "Russia has loose nukes!" premise of the plot aside. Also, the villain is a former Swedish special forces member turned nuclear theorist! I also appreciated that Hunt's phantasmic wife was no longer being actively put in threat of danger by the villain, and that the character who was motivated by revenge for a loved one's death was a woman of color. And unlike M:I 3, with that stupid "rabbit's foot" McGuffin malarkey, the stakes were comprehensible. This is one of the things I think is important in movies like this, actually, can you tell?What I actually find most interesting, on a sort of meta-cinematic level, is the question of just why Hollywood is suddenly obsessed (again) with nuclear war. It's the central plot device of two major movies this year (XM:FC and M:I 4), and I just don't quite get it. Something like Goldeneye, that made a lot of sense (though it wasn't even about nuclear weapons, but EMP) for its time and place, but why are we suddenly worried about nuclear war and nuclear terrorism so much again? Did I miss a general societal memo somewhere?
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Though it's not just the munitions factories, as my seeing the film again yesterday confirmed--he's got drugs, bandages, and foodstuffs rolled up too. So even if he loses the arms production, he still makes lots of cash.