Mission: Impossible III - 2006 - Film

Friday, May 19, 2006

"Where the hell have you been for the past ten years?" my friend Alberto asked when I told him I had not seen the first two installments of Mission: Impossible. So I accepted his invitation to watch the second sequel, Mission: Impossible III, with no expectations other than to be distracted by blurry action shots and Tom Cruise's tight t-shirts. After all, I had no connection with either of the first M:I's, so this was simply an excuse to get me out of the apartment on Friday night. But let me start here: I. Love. This. Movie.

Now I have to see the first two of the M:I series, and I will, but I feel confident after seeing this one first that I didn't necessarily misunderstand the film as a part of the trilogy. Though the three are connected in terms of character and premise, each one stands on its own--this we can see on the surface knowing the disparity among each of M:I's directors, Brian De Palma (Mission: Impossible (1996)) and John Woo (Mission: Impossible II (2000)), both of whom were also working in a pre-9/11 world.

This is the first post-9/11 action movie that seems contemplative of those terrorist events. Action sequences look different here. You can see the movement unfolding and can make out the subtle actions of objects and people as they fly through the air and crash and burn. On 9/11 we saw planes crash into buildings and people hurdle through the air to the ground without the aid of editing and camera movement. A steady camera held those images in the frame as they acted. Mirroring that, Mission: Impossible III shows its characters move within the frame as if we are watching them in real time. The camera holds still, there is a tension in the duration of shots that force us to see the characters act; people, cars, and everything in the space around them perform; the unmoderated frame is where the dynamism of action lies, not of that which exists in the editing.

For instance, there is a scene on a highway where cars crash and explode from the oncoming fire from a plane above. A helicopter swoops and chases Ethan (Tom Cruise) as he maneuvers between overturned cars and twisted metal bonfires. In the foreground we see him in close-up, his movements are blurry and disorienting; in the background a car flips over and crashes to the ground in its final resting place. Part of what 9/11 taught us is how to see action unfold, how to visually conceptualize what a catastrophe looks like as it occurs. Time is stretched and seconds seem longer when you are forced to see terror and destruction before your eyes, unmediated by effects and editing. In this respect, Mission: Impossible III is revolutionary.