Impossible is the best Blockbuster franchise right now

Here's what you need to know in Mission: Impossible – Fallout The sixth entry in the Tom Cruise franchise, 22 years of espionage: absolutely nothing.

Of course, there is some continuity between Fallout and the last adventure, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation . There is the dangerous band of former spies become terrorists, led by the infamous Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). There's also Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a former MI6 agent whose partnership with Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his Mission Impossible Team (IMF) continues with the same interrogation points and asterisks.

These minor details are the most far gone in the development of story lines from one movie to the other, and yet that does not matter. If you have never seen a movie "Mission: Impossible" – or, more likely, if you have seen dozens of other movies in the meantime and you have given your mental space to countless other aesthetic experiences and life – there is no need to worry. You will not miss a beat.

For this reason alone, the series Mission: Impossible stands out from the typical blockbuster franchise, which aims to build the world and tell dense stories It would be unthinkable, for example, to fall into the sixth film Harry Potter and s & # 39; wait to grasp the stakes and emotional complexity of an epic story more than a dozen hours in the narrative A team of superheroes like Avengers: Infinity War – or one of the movies in the Marvel film universe, from elsewhere – requires knowledge of its predecessors. the details as if you were watching the movies yesterday. Make the summer escape look like homework.

There is a related point which is more important and which explains why Mission: Impossible has been so formidable for so long. Because there is no interest in a greater mythology, the only real mission of the aftermath is to continue to surpbad their predecessors. Fallout and Rogue Nation are the first two to share a director, Christopher McQuarrie. But after Brian De Palma set the standard with the first Mission: Impossible it's a game of All you can do better than I can do better among the most talented craftsmen of the Industry, with John Woo, the Hong Kong Action Maestro behind Hard Boiled and Face / Off ; J.J. Abrams, who created the superb television series spy Alias ​​ and continued to direct Star Wars: The Force Awakens ; and Brad Bird, the author-director of The Incredibles films for Pixar.

Ethan Hunt's plug-and-play adventures, like James Bond, include a handful of mandatory elements – "Your Mission" "This message will self-destruct in five seconds," the unmasking, among others, and the standard Byzantine conspiracy on terrorist cells, rogue agents and other troublemakers who embark on mbad destruction

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But from the break-in at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in the first " Mission: Impossible ", movies have always been built around the pieces, fans of the series are probably more likely to identify the individual film as" the one where he climbs Burj Khalifa "or" the one where he is under the " 39 "water" or "A half dozen times you can watch" Mission: Imp ossible – Ghost Protocol "and still do not remember what" ghost protocol "means, but you will not forget Tom Cruise walking off the planet

Even harder to remember is the excuse for Ethan Hun He puts himself in danger. Hunt scales over 100 floors above Burj Khalifa's skyscraper floor in "Ghost Protocol" – with only one flawed pair of high-tech climbing gloves separating it from disaster – for the common purpose of 39; access a computer server room. Hunt plunges into a submarine vault for three minutes (and a bit of change) in Rogue Nation with the goal of exchanging a safety profile so that a member of the US Navy would be in charge. IMF team can access a building. Again, there is the overarching goal of protecting the world from catastrophic dangers – bulk nuclear weapons, viral outbreaks, toxic chemicals, as usual – but all that is needed to float Tom Cruise at 1700 feet above the streets of Dubai. This is not serious.

What matters is the thrill of the moment, like discovering the new attraction of your favorite theme park. And the emphasis on physical stunts and on the clbadic construction of suspense sequences has deepened the niche appeal of movies over time, in stark contrast to a cycle of superheroes who embraced the CGI's plasticity. The first "Mission: Impossible" was produced in the early years of digital effects, when they were ascending but not dominant. The last entries, on the other hand, have been a dazzling respite from the standards of the standard blockbuster, captured in green screen, which recall that the actual places, the blues and the choreographed action scenes have a visceral impact. Zeros can not replicate.

The Franchise Mission: Impossible is primarily a monument to Tom Cruise – or, more accurately, the Cruise Monument to itself, since it was the only driving force of the series from the beginning. (Ving Rhames, the IMF's hacker, Luther Stickell, is the only other actor to appear in the six films.) The staging of Cruise's director talents has prevented him from being flawed and embodies a career maintained in the air for decades by great filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, Cameron Crowe and Doug Liman.

Yet, seeing the 56-year-old Cruise in Fallout – where he jumps buildings, abandons his body to choreographic fights and makes his inimitable sprint back straight through an open space – is d & To attend a real artist at work. Cruise's broken ankle when creating Fallout but it seems like it's his pleasure to do it. To keep this endorphin rush from an ongoing series, it would break all the bones of its body.

(c) 2018, The Washington Post

(Except for the title, this story was not published by NDTV Staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)