mission: impossible - fallout, or accurate london geography
in which tom figures it out
A fun thing I like to do is to keep track of who was President when instalments of long-running franchises came out. I’m a fun guy, I know.
Mission: Impossible spans five Presidents, the distribution of which can sometimes be uneven. The first two came out under Clinton, while the fourth and fifth were Obama era. By virtue of the 2000s Tom Cruise career crisis, Bush’s eight years and two terms are represented by just one Mission. The Dead Reckoning duology will notch two for Biden.
Which just leaves the sixth one. 2018 was, in case you have forgotten, during the Donald Trump administration, making this movie the one and only Trump-era Mission: Impossible.
That doesn’t mean anything for the movie, or for its cultural context. I just needed some preamble, and this is what came to mind.
Welcome to Mission: Impossible - Fallout. It’s not about Donald Trump.
This one came together pretty quickly, but it could have been even quicker.
The general pattern for Mission to date has been that Paramount takes a breather for a couple of years and then nervously scrolls down to T for Tom in its contacts. The formula broke here. Likely buoyed by the pre-release confidence surrounding Rogue Nation, everyone involved got to work on Mission six before that movie even came out. Cruise was already talking up a summer 2016 production start on the Rogue Nation press circuit. This was what the biz (business) calls the fast track.
Aiding this accelerated development was the decision we spent a long time banging on about last week: to finally break with tradition and bring back the same director from the previous movie. McQuarrie was officially rehired in late 2015, and nobody seemed all that shocked. The anthology approach, in the end, died quietly.
Shockingly quietly, actually - there’s little trace of any real kerfuffle about the decision not to ring up whoever was hot in 2015 for the sixth instalment. That speaks mostly to the popularity of McQuarrie’s work on Rogue, but probably also to the fact that film Twitter hadn’t quite developed into its monstrous and twisted final form by the mid 2010s. Vulgar auteur Twitter would have had things to say here, and we can be truly grateful that it was not cogent enough at this time to form them.
In any case, the Cruise-McQuarrie partnership was set. In the years since, it has become ironclad. McQuarrie seems to do little else, and even on a project like Top Gun: Maverick where McQ isn’t directing, Tom still calls in his buddy to screenwrite. The near-endless production of the Dead Reckoning duology, largely in a COVID bubble, (coming up on three years of filming!) has seemed to cement the two men as life partners sharing joint custody of one brain. They seem to spend all their time together. In a brief, extraordinarily rare unscripted appearance on the Light the Fuse podcast, Cruise mentions that he’s recording from Wimbledon, where he’s keeping McQuarrie’s wife company while her husband works on editing.
I’ll leave you to project whatever you like onto that.
The seemingly irrepressible momentum of Mission six was such that even a classic pre-production hitch didn’t last for long. Trades reported in August 2016 that Cruise was at loggerheads with Paramount over his pay, a dispute that briefly shut down prep work. It’s easy to imagine a squabble like this really messing things up circa 2006, when Cruise-Paramount relations were highly flammable, but in this calmer era, it took just four weeks for everyone to sort out their differences.
It wasn’t that Cruise’s career was trouble-free. In fact, this pay dispute was directly related to the biggest snafu of his late career period - he wanted to be paid equally to his fee on The Mummy.
It’d be utterly remiss if I didn’t mention the Dark Universe, right?
Even as the 2010s rolled into their second half, Cruise was determined to maintain something of a diverse Hollywood portfolio. In that vein, he chose to sign up for The Mummy, a reboot presided over by old friend Alex Kurtzman, who we last saw in our Mission III newsletter. It’s likely that this opportunity looked particularly juicy to Cruise because it allowed him to get in on the hottest trend of the 2010s: the cinematic universe.
See, The Mummy wasn’t just The Mummy. Post-Avengers, everyone in Hollywood wanted that interconnected universe money, and they’d use any IP in their cupboards to get it done (see our Amazing Spider-Man 2 newsletter for another example of Hollywood hubris!). Perhaps the most infamous of all these attempts was what Universal tried to do. You know it, you love it: it’s the Dark Universe, baby!
At some point, Universal executives realised they had their own IP-filled cupboard ready to go: their classic library of monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein and the Invisible Man. Those were kind of the cinematic universe of the 20th century, right? Why not give them all a spruce and chain them together? Why not hire some of the biggest names in Hollywood to play them?
What if a universe was dark?
Pictured left from right - that’s Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s Monster, Cruise as Nick Morton (oh, we’ll get to that), some guy I don’t recognise as the Invisible Man and Sofia Boutella as The Mummy.
They were laying down cash on this. The proposed movies ranged from obvious classics like Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein, vehicles for Bardem (and briefly Angelina Jolie as said Bride!) and that guy I don’t recognise, to… slightly more out-there suggestions like Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The connecting narrative thread, cooked up by a sentient mound of cocaine, was a magical monster-hunting organisation called Prodigium, who would show up in all the movies. Beyond that, the overarching aim was unclear. Was the idea that all of these monsters would team up in an Avengers-style movie? Were we going to see the Phantom of the Opera high-fiving Dracula? The Wolfman riding the Creature from th Black Lagoon into battle? Nobody involved really seemed to know.
What they did know is that The Mummy was going to be the kick off, the Iron Man. It’d introduce Crowe, Boutella, and at its centre, Cruise as central Dark Universe fixtures. Crowe and Boutella were classic Universal monsters. Cruise was… Nick Morton.
Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe inventing a random guy for Cruise to play and making him a Universal Monster was a bad foundation for a Dark Universe. Likely, the entire project was doomed anyway, by virtue of being absolutely fucking stupid. I just know that “US Sergeant Nick Morton” was not a good idea. It’s the direct equivalent of lining up an Avengers team which is lead by an original character named Dave.
Cruise did commit to the project, with trade reports describing him as a control freak terrorist who haunted the editing bay like a malignant spectre, maximising every inch of screen time for beloved cinematic legend Nick Morton. It didn’t take. The Mummy did genuinely quite well overseas, but bombed at the US box office, and nobody seemed to like it very much. To the shock and horror of the speedball which has seized control of the Universal C-suite, audiences did not care for Nick Morton or Prodigium.
The Dark Universe quietly died, and Cruise backed away, using Mission six to soften the career blow. Everybody agreed to forget what had happened here, but there are some who still keep the flame. There are some who whisper of Prodigium. They are the chroniclers of the lost stories, the sentinels of fallen dreams. With their help, we will continue to remember the Dark Universe, and what it taught us.
Anyway. Mission: Impossible - Fallout was inevitable. It even barrelled through a mid-production problem that made Cruise’s pay dispute look small - the man himself, whilst filming a foot chase sequence in London, broke his ankle. This footage is preserved in the actual film, for the record. With costs spiralling and filming delayed, the movie faced disaster. Fortunately, Tom speedran the bone recovery process and returned to work in a couple of months, relegating a potential movie-ending crisis to a fun talk show anecdote.
Maybe Fallout - the sentient film - knew it was needed. The summer of 2018, as it turned out, was more of a 2015 than it was a 2014 (and if you don’t know what that means, read our previous newsletters, damn it!), littered with blockbusters that were failures, crap, or both. After the somewhat significant kickoff of Avengers: Infinity War, moviegoers were treated to the likes of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Deadpool 2 and Skyscraper. Franchises were in their flop era, and not even the saintly delights of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again could mask the scent of crap.
Deadpool 2 bears a little elaboration as an example of where action cinema was at, around 2018. The original film - fatally bland on a visual level, whatever merits you want to ascribe it as a superhero comedy - was helmed by relative newbie Tim Miller, so the sequel snagged some additional action prestige with the hiring of David Leitch. If the name seems familiar, it’s because we’ve crossed paths with him before, with his direction of Hobbs & Shaw. Leitch, at the time, was best known for co-directing John Wick and the entertaining knock-off Atomic Blonde, so it earned the Deadpool sequel some useful street cred. At the end of the day, that was all it really was - Leitch’s hiring brought a nice sheen of genre cool, plastered on top of a movie that’s frantically reshuffling about a cinematic universe that would collapse in a year’s time.
A little bleak? Sure. An opportunity for a real action movie from a real action filmmaker and star to run the table? Also that.
Enough beating around the bush. You probably want to know if I’m going to awkwardly shuffle back from my confident opinions this week. Did I jump the gun on saying this week’s movie was the best Mission: Impossible yet?
Well, tough luck, suckers. I was right, and you were wrong, even though none of you called me out on this to begin with, and this is a feud I have completely invented.
I mean, yeah. Fallout is the best Mission: Impossible. It’s not cool to say an opinion is objective, but this one is objective. It just is. Any opinions otherwise look to me like snot-nosed pick-me contrarianism. Oh? You think Ghost Protocol was best? Well, I bet you’re a darn laugh riot at parties with that nerdy little stick-in-the-mud attitude, pedant.
I’ll say it: there are no real criticisms of Fallout. Nobody has ever articulated a reason why it falls short. Before you try to explain to me how it’s realistic commentary of Tom Cruise in business, and conservative Tom Cruise, please consider that I know that. Please consider that maybe, just maybe, I’ve taken that into account and maybe I am even thinking of something you haven’t yet.
God, that’s a painfully niche discourse joke that’s going to age like milk.
Look, fine, other opinions exist. You can think the original was the best if you like. Knock yourself out. Freedom of speech means the freedom to be wrong.
Fallout worked as a lightning bolt of purely entertaining action cinema in the sleepy summer of 2018, but it works even better in the context of the five movies before it. This is a franchise with a remarkably impressive baseline of quality, but it’s also wrestled with various ongoing problems - how to characterise Ethan Hunt, how to use Cruise as an actor, how to create a compelling narrative alongside the stunts, how to make the action serve the story, how to offer a broad and diverse ensemble alongside Cruise. Even Rogue Nation, a finely-tuned little movie, found itself stuck in the mud. These are not easy issues to fix.
But Fallout makes it look easy. Fallout treats the ongoing quandaries of Mission: Impossible look like putting up a shelf. It fixes all the above problems quite literally before the opening titles hit. That pre-titles sequence is practically a full meal unto itself that sets up a mission, plays it out, fakes a dark twist ending and then re-twists back in fifteen minutes. By the time Wolf Blitzer unmasks himself to reveal Simon Pegg (it’s a lot to take in), it’s like the movie is taking a bow after a complete performance. Then the opening titles hit, and you realise there’s an entire two hours and ten minutes left on the clock, and that you haven’t seen a single major stunt sequence yet.
And then it just goes. Out of the titles and into a French airfield. In comes Henry Cavill. They’re jumping out of a plane into a lightning storm. They land. Bathroom fistfight. Vanessa Kirby’s here now. Solomon Lane’s back now. Heist sequence, car chase, motorcycle chase. Tom Cruise quickdraw scene. London. Henry Cavill villain twist. Alec Baldwin’s dead. London footchase. Tate Modern elevator ride. Michelle Monaghan’s back. Kashmir. Nukes. Helicopters. Nukes and helicopters. Cavill Two-Face. Cliff fistfight. Detonator free climb. Day saved, three minutes’ coda, credits.
There, that’s the whole movie. It moves like exquisite clockwork. If an action movie is often battling the viewer’s temptation to skip to the good bits - well, that’s not a battle to be fought here. It’s nothing but good bits.
Ethan Hunt’s characterisation is not a problem here. Fallout, in its philosophical noodlings about the trolley problem, clarifies Ethan in the sharpest definition we’ve seen: the man who literally refuses to accept that the trolley problem exists. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Nah. Both. Ethan Hunt vales human life, both on the individual and collective level, so fucking much, and he is able to achieve this because he is fundamentally separate from common humanity. He radiates empathy like a spinning death laser. He’s the best person who has ever lived.
But - and this is the most important thing - he never has a single fucking clue what he is doing. It’s all on the fly. His superpower is yes-and. He shouts I’LL FIGURE IT OUT!! like eight times in this movie. This all, miraculously, glues together as a character. I think this is in large part because Ethan is so closely linked to McQuarrie and Cruise’s impulses as storytellers. They, too, are improvisers cooking up plans so ridiculous they just might work against impossible odds. Consider this: McQuarrie happily admits to picking locations for setpieces based on whatever mad stunt Cruise wants to do, and then he figures out how to put that into the story, often amidst filming. That’s Huntcore right there.
Broad and diverse ensemble: tick. Fallout wisely brings everyone except Renner - let’s be honest, he’s a block you can push out of the Jenga tower easily enough - and lets them hang out. Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa gets more time to shine and develop, even if little about her character’s ongoing motivations makes sense. Heck, even Solomon Lane is back, and he’s now a whacked-out beardo accelerationist. Lots more fun!
Onto this, McQuarrie carefully ladles a few new faces. Vanessa Kirby, fresh off her Crown-induced late 2010s action movie moment, gets an instant showcase with her butterfly knife, and earns herself a place in the wider ensemble for Dead Reckoning. Then there’s the second man on the call sheet - Henry Cavill.
Cavill is a difficult figure to define. For a vocal portion of the #ReleaseTheSnyderVerse fanbase, or whatever they call themselves these days, he is akin to a deity. For others, he’s a would-be movie star who never quite made it. His Superman is at the centre of the 2010s’ most hot-button, divisive trilogy that isn’t the Star Wars sequels, and though most agree he came out of them well, the weird and choppy vibe of the Snyder Superman (who dies in movie two, what?) means that Cavill never really got to bed into the role.
Fallout, of course, is linked strongly to the Snyder-Whedon debacle on Justice League. For those who don’t know - and what the heck are you doing here? - Joss Whedon decided to rewrote most of the script when he came aboard Justice League, necessitating several weeks of reshoots that overlapped with Fallout’s shooting schedule. Hilariously, McQuarrie flat refused to let Cavill shave the moustache he had grown to play August Walker, so the Justice League reshoots went ahead with the world’s first fully CGI lip.
It’s not that easy to tell.
It’s practically seamless.
Anyhow, it was all for a good cause. Cavill is great in Fallout, first as Ethan Hunt’s douchebag partner in crime, and then as the sneering villain of the piece. As has now become famous, he reloads his arms before punching someone. He gets that Aaron Eckhart burned face CGI in the final act for no particular reason. It’s good stuff. The metatext of old guard star Tom Cruise beating the shit out of a budding action hero twenty years his junior? Well, that’s just the icing on the beefcake.
Incidentally, Fallout jumpstarted Cavill’s career so effectively that he soon found his next big role as Geralt in The Witcher, a show nobody likes aside from his performance. It’s been sunny days for him ever since, excepting the brief incident last autumn where he was co-opted into the Rock’s power games at Warner Bros. Discovery and returned as Superman for a total of three weeks before being let go from the role again. Liam Hemsworth will now be the Witcher.
Back to Fallout.
Besides anything else, the action here is franchise-best stuff - wall to wall stunts and set-pieces delivered with the breathless sense of glee of two middle-aged men lost in a jam session (which is a fairly accurate summary of the whole McQuarrie-Cruise dynamic, when it comes down to it). Fallout even cracks the third act problem, ending with the movie’s biggest and wildest stunt sequence rather than blowing it early. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a geographically accurate foot chase between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern across Blackfriars Bridge. Be still, my beating heart.
(If Tom Cruise was truly interested in representing my life and culture, he would have run from the BFI Southbank to Blackfriars station to catch a train that leaves a minute earlier than advertised, but I get it, he’s a global star and he has to please a lot of people. This was a more than adequate compromise.)
Finally - and this is my sweatiest argument of the lot, so bear with me - Fallout finally offers the first narrative since the first movies to be worthy of the wild action around it. Trimming down a little on the dense plottiness of Rogue Nation but using a lot of. the groundwork it set up, Fallout’s story is satisfyingly twisty and emotional in a way this franchise has frequently failed to be.
Here, the virtues of rehiring the same guy to write and direct shine through - there’s an actual history to the characters and their experiences that represents the upside of allowing real continuity to leak into the franchise. The little core unit of Ethan, Benji, Luther and (sort of) Ilsa feel like friends who care about one another, and the easy intimacy of several movies spent together is right there on the screen.
Fallout even pulls a rare movie for the franchise and jumps back into the franchise’s history to revisit a fruitful story that was left by the wayside - the whole Ethan Hunt marriage situation. Michelle Monaghan doesn’t have tons to do in the third act, but Julia’s inclusion finds a surprisingly elegant way to extract that whole storyline from its weird Cruise-normal-life-PR context and reframe it as a lost chapter of a life that always has to keep moving forwards.
It’s a subtler, more judicious version of the Fast Five trick: a franchise realising there’s a whole back catalogue of characters and stories that can be loosely re-interpreted at its convenience. Evidently, though Monaghan seems to have fulfilled her obligations with this extended cameo, McQuarrie is a fan of the move, because he’s gone and brought Henry Czerny from the first movie back for Dead Reckoning.
The best Glup Shittoes are the ones the audience actually care to see again. Viva Director Kittridge.
Everything landed Fallout’s way: it was the biggest hit of the franchise to date, and kick-started a fun-bizarre late summer hot streak in 2018 where audiences went bugnuts for The Meg and Crazy Rich Asians.
Cruise took an understandable lesson from this: no more Dark Universe, no more exploits in genre film. It would be own-brand only from now on.
That meant Mission: Impossible, and more time with McQuarrie.
But it also meant going all-in on the other franchise he was currently reheating. The summer of 2018, in fact, was a busy one for Cruise in more than just one way.
Next time: Our story ends where it began - at the flight school the Navy calls Fighter Weapons School, and where the fliers call it…
Well, you know.
Top Gun: Maverick overcame years of delays, audience scepticism and the possible collapse of the entire theatrical industry to become Cruise’s biggest ever film and his first Oscar nomination in decades.
How it got there is a long story. Long enough that our last newsletter of this Tom Cruise series will be a last two newsletters.
(Sorry.)
"Cruise did commit to the project, with trade reports describing him as a control freak terrorist who haunted the editing bay like a malignant spectre, maximising every inch of screen time for beloved cinematic legend Nick Morton." LOL! This is one of the funniest things I've read on this newsletter!
I'm a little sad you don't mention the underrated 'Dracula: Untold.' If I recall correctly, it was retrofitted to be the first true or lead-up Dark Universe movie at one point or another. Maybe they dropped that idea later in favor of The Mummy?
Also, why not discuss the leaked trailer with those missing sound effects?