The fact that it has Brad Bird at the helm is a large part of the reason I'm planning to see this when it comes out.
I saw it. It was enjoyable. However, the real reason I am bumping this thread is that the film has a reference to A113, the original (Character?) Animation classroom at Cal Arts. Even in Live Action, Brad Bird is not forgetting his roots.
Looks good. Too bad Paramount basically dumped The Adventures Of Tintin to release it.
More Buscemi at http://forum.reelsociety.com/Just watched it. It follows a lot of the basic action movie tropes to the letter, but everything was very competently done and lampshaded some of the excessiveness ("Mission Accomplished!!!"). The only complaint is that the villain in this movie seemed like he could have been pretty good but he wasn't really memorable because he had so few scenes. For good or bad, the Mission Impossible movies had some fairly strong villains (even 2, if only for the "Evil Counterpart to Ethan" nature). Personally, while a solid movie I think a lot of critics may be going a little light on it because everyone loves Brad Bird.
The big plus is that the focus was so tight on the IMF team that they all were memorable and it didn't feel as tacked on as in 3 (while a nice attempt, the car bonding scene felt like "Here is our character building moment"). For the first time the movie wasn't really about Ethan, it was about the mission and what the team can do. The previous movies were more about Ethan being supported by the team, not the team working together to accomplish a goal. Ethan had his story, but so did Carter, Benji, and Brant.
And before we went to the movie my Dad said that while he liked all of the films he said he was sad they didn't go with one of the main themes of the original TV series, that if they did their job right no one knew they were there. He really liked that the end of the movie had a bunch of news reports with no idea of what actually happened.
edited 27th Dec '11 1:06:26 AM by KJMackley
@ Audrey: Tom Cruise is ageless. He could be 70 and he'd still look the part.
More Buscemi at http://forum.reelsociety.com/definitely a better film as far as non-Ethan character building, but there was one Big-Lipped Alligator Moment for me as far as gadgetry goes- the magnetic suit thing.
there were plenty of other devices they could have used, but it crossed the line from "really cool and interesting spy gadget" (like the eye-tracking wall projector thing) to "forget you ever learned kindergarten science!"
So here's a guy wearing a magnetic suit hovering above a magnetic robot. Sure. With giant metal fan blades between them. Derp. Going into a computer room. Double derp. Where you can see visibly metallic grates between the agent and the robot. Triple derp.
were they really that desperate to recreate the hover scene from the first MI?
i also had another problem with the other computer scene. so, at the very end, the bad guy flees and in the process rips away hundreds of cables (mostly network cables) out of their sockets, damaging a good bunch of them in the process. ok, it might be a bit of a leap here, but i was assuming that most of them needed to be fixed in order to get the uplink to the satellite working again. Benji is even seen attempting to rewire individual damaged cables at some point.
then he just gives up and says, "Here, jam these two thingys in this and as long as the power's on everything's fine."
...so none of that actually mattered? what? i don't think it even qualifies as Hollywood Hacking because in there, characters are at least doing things that matter in their version of "hacking." here, it looked like the bad guy did nothing to the computers, Benji wasted ten minutes fixing nothing at all, and then everything works anyways.
edited 31st Dec '11 12:55:51 PM by willyolio
There's actually a pretty logical explanation: The bad guy didn't know what would happen when he ripped out the cables, since he was trying to get out of there fast.
Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.The guy did a lot of damage but a lot of wires and systems in a server that massive are redundant and probably not related to the specific task they were try to accomplish. Benji would be tech-savvy enough to make the necessary repairs with reimplanting the drives being the last step, not the only step. As for doing it all in the space of a few minutes that would be unlikely, but the time needed to do something in movies in general are always dependant on what is most dramatic.
As for the glue gloves, the main advantage to them is that it saves your grip strength, instead you can focus all your effort on the climb that wouldn't be there with the magnetic or suction cups they had used before. The fact they malfunctioned is secondary to the point of Ethan being willing to use them for such a climb when he was just instructed on how to use them in the first place.
edited 31st Dec '11 4:47:48 PM by KJMackley
As a vertigo sufferer, the scenes on the world's tallest building freaked me the Hell out. Some of the scariest shots I've seen in a while, so a good thing I didn't see it in Imax (even looking at high heights on film sets it off).
Still, the film was exactly what I expected and wanted - mindless, pointless, brainless tosh that made no sense whatsoever but nonetheless was an enjoyable action film with enough characterisation for the main characters and good use of comic relief. As with Fast Five, this was another that did not deviate from expectations, which I mean in a good way.
My name is Addy. Please call me that instead of my username.

No, I'm not going to call it Mission Impossible- Ghost Protocol. This is not a Tom Clancy novel, I'm sick of the stupid subtitles, Hollywood!
But aside from that, I recently discovered it was going to exist
. Also, props for blowing up the actual Kremlin and not St Basil's Cathedral. The presence of our favourite morally ambiguous robot made me think it was going to be directed by J.J. Abrams who directed the third movie but low and behold it is in fact under the direction of Brad Bird.