See the World While Dangling off a Helicopter in new Mission: Impossible – Fallout Video
We’ve been talking about how Mission: Impossible – Fallout looks like it has the chance to be the most aggressively action-packed film in a franchise famous for it. We shared these new photos, which highlight Mission: Impossible‘s commitment to honoring that Impossible in the title with increasingly insane stunts. Today, we turn our attention to another cornerstone of the franchise—international locations. In a new video shared by Paramount, we get to travel the world with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and the rest of the cast and crew. The commitment the Mission: Impossible team have to real stunts is matched by their commitment to filming in actual locations. The name of the game in this franchise is immersion—Cruise and crew want you to feel that not only is the action real, but that it’s taking place in real environments all over the world. Which, of course, it is. “To do things practically does make a difference for an audience,” Cruise says in the below video.
The marriage of practical stunts and real locations is the bread and butter of a Mission: Impossible movie, and while other franchises are committed to doing much the same, none do so with the exacting attention to detail that this 22-year old series brings to bear. This is partly due, of course, to the immense success of Mission: Impossible, and also partly to do with Cruise’s almost pathological need to keep upping the ante for every fresh installment. “Mission: Impossible is about immersing audiences into these places and into this world, and celebrating the geography of the environments we’re in,” Cruise says. The way a Mission: Impossible film celebrates geography is by having Cruise hurl his body through space, dangle off cliffs, drive at top speeds through busy intersections, hang off the sides of planes and the bottom of helicopters, and generally see whatever location he’s in from the vantage of someone about to die.
In Fallout, Hunt drives the wrong way around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, goes on a barefoot chase through the streets of London, hangs off the side of a mountain in Norway (and falls), and hangs off the bottom of a helicopter in New Zealand (Cruise got his helicopter pilot’s license in order to shoot this scene for real) to name just a few of the locations. There’s a scene set in Abu Dhabi, and one can only imagine what kind of insanity Hunt avails himself of in the capitol of the Arab Emirates.
Will Fallout be the best film in the franchise? From everything we’ve seen thus far, it certainly has a chance. We can be sure that, owing to the Moore’s Law of this particular franchise, it’ll definitely be the most insane.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout opens wide on July 27.
Featured image: Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT, from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2018 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.
