Ok, so I went to see the movie this afternoon, even though my sister and her boyfriend thought X-Men 3 would be better. What do I think of the movie? I'll start off by saying that I'm not surprised that the rumor is Paramount wants JJ Abrams to revive the Star Trek movie franchise, after seeing what he has done for this one. Tom Cruise-haters will probably continue to hate him, though his acting is passable. And yes, evidently directors love to see him run.
Of course there is still an emphasis on action; there is barely any time given to the elaborate con game of the TV series (either one--who still remembers the new one that was brought back in the late 80s? or was it early 90s? I don't think the new one survived to the third season... MacGyver lasted longer--anyone see the credit card commercial with Richard Dean Anderson reprising his role?).
The pacing for the movie was ok--if you can accept the plot premise of a super agent who can do everything, plus pull off not-so-covert missions in front of many witnesses without even bothering with a disguise (even though they have a machine to make them), then it's an ok way to pass 2 hours. In many respects it's better than the first movie, and certainly much better than the second.
As for the Vatican mission--it's not clear to me what the villain's cover is that would enable him to be invited to a party there. Then again, it wasn't clear why there was such a party in the first place, though it is implied that it was for rich people. Tom Cruise was wearing a zuchetto--not sure if it was authentic, or designed by someone in Hollywood. Nothing overtly anti-Catholic, unless there is something to the party.
I don't know about the ending credits song by Kanye West--too much Kanye in that song, I wonder if his ego is that big. Do the lyrics even match the movie? Or is it relevant only because the word impossible is repeated over and over again?
More about movie-going in another post...
2 comments:
Hrm, the "new" Mission Impossible ran from 1988 to 1990, so that's a good two or three seasons assuming ten to twelve hour-long eps. While I hardly remember anything from it, growing up, I do recall that the original Mr. Phelps was in it, and that it honored the core conceit of the original: the Team of Four, disguisery, and them always getting missinos from the Voice.
The thing I can't stand in retrospect is that the first Mission Impossible movie spent its first five minutes dismantling the core conceits of the TV show (the team is dead, the sole survivor goes rogue) and then as the big "twist", it's Mr. Phelps that engineered the whole thing as little more than a tantrum brought on by post-cold-war malaise. If anyone wasn't cut loose and spurred on to aimless mischief by the fall of the Iron Curtain, it wasn't soldiers and spies, it was screenwriters.
I'm suprised that the Mission Impossible TV series lasted as long as it did; the early Nineties are littered with ten episode shows that never really got off the ground, the likes of which included War of the Worlds, RoboCop, and Space: Above and Beyond.
Robocop was in syndication for a while, iirc. Space Above and Beyond made it to a full season, but wasn't picked up--they could have tried to adapt Wing Commander instead. War of the Worlds lasted two full seasons, things went downhill after the end of the first, when they killed off many of the characters, and the aliens themselves had a purge at the beginning of the second.
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