#Mission: Impossible 3 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

odetoviscera · 1 year

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Liveblogging Mission: Impossible 3, Lens Flare-ily

BACK. BACK AGAIN. THE MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. THE ETHAN: HUNTED MAYBE I ASSUME??? THEMATIC COLOUR BASED ON THE PARAMOUNT+ BANNER: COOL BLUE.

i think these are just getting longer. liveblogging below.

this movie released in 2006, when i was sixteen and therefore very likely to have seen it. i have the vague impression that i did. i still don’t remember anything specific about it, but we’ll see if any Buried Memories resurface during this viewing lol

paramount logo now comes with Vaguely Sinister Sounds

oop, i hear ethan getting electrocuted

and oh BOY is he looking rough. my boy :( we’re in media res i guess lol. “we’ve put an explosive charge in your head.” i bet you’re wondering how i got into this mess--

is that philip seymour hoffman??? yes it is, as our villain for the piece, one assumes. you don’t waste philip seymour hoffman on your cold open only villain who never shows up again lol

“you’re gonna tell me where the rabbit’s foot is or she dies” so firstly: obviously The Villain has made an accurate assessment of Ethan Hunt’s Survival Instincts. secondly: whomst? whomst this? “jules” apparently.

ethan goes from “we can talk like gentlemen”-- shot of a goon with a broken nose that i assume ethan gave him here, btw, which: split second of levity, thank you movie-- to RATTLING THE CHAINS ON HIS CHAIR LIKE A DOG ON A CHOKE CHAIN between the villain counting from two to three. i am. FULL OF CONCERN. movie has done a genuinely good job setting a High Stress Threshold from the word go lol

OOF villain just shot hostage lady in i think the knee? it went pretty fast. either way he is Not Impressed with ethan’s attempts at negotiation.

you know i am genuinely not sure ethan actually knows what villain guy wants? he seems to be legitimately losing his mind about hostage lady, i’m not sure he’d still be prevaricating by this point. sometimes he surprises me though!

HMM. got to count of ten, and i’m not sure if that was a gunshot or the Mission Impossible Match Lighting for the opening! will be interested to see if we’re going back in time or if this was the Trauma Setup for the film

so who’s our director on this-- oh it’s JJ ABRAMS? where is this in his filmography… huh, i guess this was his directorial debut in film. he’d previously worked as a director in tv on alias and lost, though-- alias is presumably what got him this one. okay, so i should expect lens flare and, ugh, “mystery boxes” lol

and the credits end with I THINK hostage lady jules opening her fridge. kind of hard to tell without the duct tape lol. but i believe this means we’re in Flashback Territory

oh ethan is kissing on her. look at that smile! one must imagine ethan hunt happy

okay her family’s over. awww, ethan: “it’s going well right?” i wonder if this is the first time he’s meeting her whole family or? regardless he is seeking Validation. insecure ethan hunt. bless.

oh it’s their engagement party! but yes it seems like this is the first time they’re meeting him. whirlwind romance?

“ethan doesn’t have his parents anymore either”-- i guess his mom died between movies?

dfklha;ldkfha;slkh ethan boring everyone at the party with his “i work at the department of transportation” cover lol

dfl;kkhas;ldkfha;lskh okay the ladies are in the kitchen gossiping and i am PRETTY SURE ethan is reading their lips from across the room lol

jules is a nurse! and apparently they met while skydiving or something lol, which based on ethan’s Freeclimbing Hobby i guess does track as something he’d do in his freetime, but DOES also open the possibility that they met on a job. i’m undecided on whether she Knows™ lol

this is all very wholesome, even without the cold open i’d know it was doomed

phone call “is this mr. ethan hunt” and he doesn’t Get It immediately despite the Sinister Tone bc he’s in Happy Ethan Cover Mode.

aaaand the penny drops. “all-expenses paid trip to mexico”

ethan: chucks the ice out the back door

ethan: oh nooo we ran out of ice i’ll go get some

listen i don’t know enough about cars to tell you what kind this is, but it is a Dad Car. ethan hunt is engaging Dad Mode before he even gets married

omg they even have a DOG. does the dog die??? hang on i have to know this before i become emotionally attached-- okay per doesthedogdie.com NO. THE DOG IS SAFE.

anyway i can’t believe The Local 7/11 is where ethan has meetings with his handler lol. oh hm ethan is Training Operatives now instead of working, apparently. this seems like a positive career move! i’m sure it won’t last!

“agent farris” is missing-- that’s not nyah is it? …no, nyah is nordoff-hall. someone else ethan trained, presumably. (speaking of which, what happened with nyah?)

and of course ethan can’t resist at least Retrieving the mission brief hidden in the disposable camera lol. oh good lord, i figured it would just be on the film reel, no, this thing has an IRIS SCANNER, someone introduce me to imf’s q, who is the silly bastard inventing these

oh we got a name for villain guy now, “owen davian”-- has farris hostage, they aren’t disavowing her bc they want her intel, apparently.

new team!

declan gormley-- sorry about your name my guy-- is an “aviation machinist” (so probably our pilot) and a sysop engineer, so probably also our hacker

zhen lei is a “lan computer networker”-- …sure-- with “combat assault skills” which should come in handy even if ethan is now specced more for soldiering than he used to be

luther! love to see you but why haven’t you retired with your bajillion dollars yet. also why are there so many hackers on this team. anyway, he’s also got “artillery equipment specialist” listed in his credentials, which i assume is from that one time he fired a bazooka at a car chasing ethan last movie lol

“this message, let’s call it my excellent engagement gift to you--” dhf;lakhd;flkhas dude. no.

i will say the latest imf bigwig seems less infuriating than the last two, even if he is Dragging Ethan Out Of Retirement. it is an “if you choose to accept it”! i mean ethan will, inevitably, accept it, bc he’s Himself, but there’s at least a hypothetical out.

ethan’s having nightmares :(

and yep, now he’s telling julia he’ll have to “go on a business trip”. although he tells her it’ll only be for a night, which is probably over-optimistic of him.

LUTHER!!!! he is exuding Competence and Confidence which is an interesting change of pace from him, lol, he’s often been a bit Anxious in the previous two movies. not about his skills, but about like. The Inherent Dangers Of The Job. i guess this is Older Wiser Luther lol

and it looks like we’re going STRAIGHT into the extraction, no setup, so uh. i’m not sure it’s gonna go well. also, first of the Really Noticeable Lens Flares lol

i will say, egregious lens flares notwithstanding lol, this is actually really well lit for a night scene. you remember when films used to LIGHT for dark scenes instead of just doing them IN the dark? those were the days

okay this is an interesting exchange between ethan and luther. luther says “you know i got your six.” and ethan’s response is just “hey, man. that’s your job.” which, objectively speaking, is TRUE-- but there’s a beat afterwards where they just look at each other before they move on. i’m not sure if this is some kind of unresolved tension from ethan having gotten out of field work for a while, if this is luther alluding to ethan’s tendency from the last movie to go into situations without the POSSIBILITY of backup, if luther is trying to remind ethan that he’s got a Full (and Fully Trained) team for possibly the first time since the first movie, if luther is trying to remind ethan that they’re FRIENDS and being kind of gently rebuffed bc this is a high-stakes field operation… unclear.

anyway luther has gotten Four Computer-Operated Guns that he can run from the safety of his little combat van setup, lol.

lkafd;lkfh;alsh okay listen. luther has heat-vision on the building. okay. i’ll buy it. luther locates a heat-signature that appears to be sitting in a slightly reclined position that looks uncomfortable and probably like restraint-- cool! that’s probably our hostage! but the computer then announcing “target match” with “VASCULAR ID CONFIRMED”-- that! is not! how that works!

okay so real quick: vascular pattern recognition is real, blood vessel patterns are about as unique as fingerprints and iris patterns, but significantly harder to counterfeit bc they’re Beneath The Skin. but you DO NOT identify vascular patterns by heat signature, they ARE NOT analyses of the entire vascular system of the body, they usually FUNCTION LIKE FINGERPRINT SCANNERS, bc they assess the blood vessel patterns beneath the skin of a fingertip. it’s a photographic comparison between the database pattern and the registered pattern, which is scanned with infrared leds and fancy cameras. it’s only more secure than a fingerprint bc of the Beneath The Skin part. don’t ask me why i know this, i write fanfiction, you just pick these things up. THIS IS NOT HOW IT WORKS!!!

look at some more lens flare. also i need you to know that the yellow lights on the left side are flickering in time with the fluttering cymbal in the score.

fh;alksdhf;lakkh luther, mid-op, “at some point we gotta go over this whole getting married thing.” luther is demanding to know if julia is good enough for his ethan lol i’m guessing he’s grumpy he wasn’t consulted

hmm, they’re drugging farris with something, “give her 10ccs more”-- oh hey, the one creepily petting her hair is the goon with the future broken nose, btw. deserved.

blow some charges and luther is lighting this place UP with his four guns lol. this seems like it might be SLIGHTLY risky with ethan and a hostage inside, but i assume they’re accounted for in the targeting ranges

ethan takes down one goon with a short burst, so he’s upgraded from hand guns to something more robust. he just gets Shootier and Shootier each movie lol

farris gets an adrenaline shot so that she can participate in her own rescue, i assume-- hopefully that doesn’t interact too badly with whatever she’s drugged with

i haven’t seen enough of the new teammates to really get a sense of them yet but zhen admittedly looks cool as hell moving through the facility towards her objective lol. i can’t get a decent screengrab of this bc the lights are flashing constantly, the cuts are too fast, and paramount+ won’t let me scroll frame by frame but just trust me that she is cool and we love a woman in military gear. also she VERY narrowly avoids getting blown up by a grenade by flinging herself out a window.

uh-oh, farris is telling ethan to turn off his transmitter so she can talk to him Privately. that’s ominous, especially Mid-Rescue while the building is full of holes

they were interrupted by a firefight, and farris’ adrenaline has definitely kicked in! looks like ethan trained her well

the intel (?) that zhen came for has been slightly blown up, hopefully still useful

fkha;ldkfh;lakshdf;lkah

lindsey: i’m out, how many rounds you got?

ethan, making The Most Concerned Unconcerned Face: …………Enough

also he makes like a thousand tiny flinching faces while he’s gearing up to take his One Shot, which Must Kill This Man bc “enough” means “one bullet”, which makes it extremely clear how much his blase “now i’m out :|”

after said shot does kill said man is a FUCKING MASK. ethan hunt knows half his reputation is cool one-liners after he does something absurd and that that’s the part people will remember, and he plays into that ON PURPOSE bc his previous job role was BEING THE FACE. i am begging everyone on earth to remember that this man’s SECOND career is soldier, and he came from THE THEATRE OF ESPIONAGE. he is a dramatic bitch INTENTIONALLY to ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING.

one INCREDIBLY hot extraction on the top of luther’s van later, and everybody’s getting on the helicopter without farris getting to have her solo talk with ethan-- aaaaand now she’s complaining of a sudden intense headache, which probably means her head is about to explode ala “we’ve put an explosive charge in your head” from the cold open

…uhoh, declan-- i was right, he is our pilot-- is hesitating to take off, and i hear another helicopter approaching-- yeah, that’s a gunship. and alas it does not get taken out by the van blowing up, so they’re being pursued-- through a field of wind turbines which is an interesting visual AND an interesting tactic by declan

oh my god so much lens flare though lol. the music is getting increasingly ominous

they've located the bomb in farris' head! according to ethan’s little magic scanner device, it contains at least nitroglycerin and magnesium, and it looks about the size of a pill, so… possibly her head does not explode as such, just. burn from the inside out.

declan doing some VERY tight maneuvering to dodge some missiles. luther is leaning out the side of the helicopter with a handgun apparently hoping he can use it to shoot down a gunship lol. MAYBE if he can get a shot through the windscreen???

….okay so ethan’s plan for dealing with the explosive is to shock farris with the defibrillator-- i’m kind of unclear on whether the plan is to use the defib on the chest as intended or like. on her HEAD. hopefully the former lol

second missile fired-- ah, okay, it looks like luther’s gun was actually a flare gun, he’s just fired it in an attempt to divert the missile ala firing chaff. which works! shears a turbine blade off into a field of very alarmed sheep lol

third missile lock, and declan just went BETWEEN THE BLADES of a wind turbine, which the following gunship really should not have attempted lol, it got crunched like tinfoil. we love to see that imf competence on display-- which their AGENTS typically do! their organization as a whole, less so

aaand the aed’s thirty-second charging window was just slightly too long and farris’ charge has detonated in her brain. relatively bloodless, although her eyes get kind of fucked up, which i will do you the favour of not screencapping

this is the face of ethan hunt about to go on the warpath, by the way

ethan hunt returning to his nice domestic life after a mission that ended in complete failure despite everyone technically doing a spectacular job

aaand putting the mask on for the almost-wife. there was a MOMENT where he wasn’t caught up and he still looked lost and devastated, and she caught it-- bc of course she did-- and he couldn’t tell her what it was about, so-- The Patented Ethan Hunt Grin comes on. this is almost extra tragic? bc like… clearly he doesn’t want his spy life to overlap with his wife life. understandable (hi cold open) and probably unavoidable, given she wouldn’t have clearance to know 99% of it anyway. but just the emotional distance between Party Ethan who seemed genuinely happy and excited and nervous in that Border Collie way-- meeting new people! being nice to them! getting his girlfriend’s brother a beer! “it’s going well, right?”-- and this ethan, who is papering over his hurt bc he can’t afford to show her what it’s about.

and you can see she doesn’t entirely buy it, either. if she survives this movie, that’s going to become an ongoing source of conflict.

oh i take it back, apparently laurence fishburne is the REAL IMF brass of this movie, and he sucks just as much as the rest of them lol. “i read your training brief on agent farris. the words you used were “beyond capable.” that still stand, mr hunt?” fuck you dude, like ya’ll don’t lose agents left and right around here

oof, yep, the intel did get fried by the grenade, which is not making the imf any happier. not, to be clear, that i want the imf to be happy. fuck the imf ethan, GO FREELANCE, these people have sucked in EVERY MOVIE

oof, farris was his First Ever recommendation for field duty. no wonder this is hitting him like a train

hmm, ethan just got a call at farris’ funeral asking for a “mr. kelvin” which must be one of his cover identities, since he answers to it. apparently farris-- or “farris”-- sent him a postcard from berlin. the postcard has no text-- it has a “microdot”, per luther’s examination, but there’s nothing on THAT either. Mysterious™

luther just asked if there was anything going on between ethan and farris-- honestly, fair question, given his track record with hooking up with the ladies he works with lol, although in at least one case that was a honeytrap working on him lol-- and ethan reports that she was “like his little sister”, which-- aww, and also :(

fla;ksdhf;laskh;lkh ethan @ luther “remember when you were sweet? can you remember that far back?” ETHAN IT WAS AT MOST TWO MOVIES AGO. arguably last movie, no i am not over his little terrified teary voice when ethan is doing dumb shit lol

new character! benji, who i have gathered from @leupagus is part of the Ongoing Team-- currently he is apparently a desk tech at imf who is complaining that the hard drives they recovered are fried lol. ethan already knows him, which is interesting.

flkahdl;fkhasl he did recover something from the Fried Drives anyway lol, so i guess he just wanted to complain. specifically he’s uncovered that davian is going to be at the vatican, and also that he’s there to get The Rabbit’s Foot (of cold open fame)

benji is one of those “tell a rambling story to get around to the point” people lol

interesting, ethan is trying to get musgrave-- the guy i originally thought was the imf brass of the movie, not technically ethan’s handler since ethan technically isn’t doing field work lol, i think he called himself a branch manager or something at some point-- “deniability” on the operation he’s about to undertake based on benji’s find. meaning he’s trying to protect musgrave’s reputation after it took a ding from the failure to recover farris.

ethan letting julia know he’s going to be “away on business” again, this time for TWO days. he interrupted her at work to have this conversation on, apparently, the roof of the hospital she works at, which is an interesting choice lol. she is Not Happy About It and asking for explanations which i can’t imagine he’s going to give her.

alskdhf;laskhdf;lkash;lkh she asks for reassurance that their relationship is real and he’s like “you know what fuck it let’s get married Right Now in the hospital chapel”. they have to use some little plastic rings he got in the gift shop or something lol. adorable. i’m love them.

aaaaand time to break into the vatican! plan: kidnap davian (and also get his buyers, which i’m assuming means ethan will be pulling out a Davian Face Mask at some point)

this is their hilariously analogue solution to not being able to loop a static shot to a vatican cctv camera. hopefully ethan didn’t get a bird in the frame lol

also he’s now dressed up as a priest and i would love to know how uncomfortable it was to keep those robes wrapped up inside the worker jumpsuit he was wearing earlier

i’m guessing this is zhen who’s underwater breaking into a vent, and it looks like declan has had his own costume change into a tourist!

actually come to think of it, how does this whole team from the failed op have time to do ethan’s off-the-books operation? how frequently do imf agents get work? we know the imf keeps tabs on them, from that time they tracked ethan down during his freeclimbing vacation, so the imf surely Knows they’re all in the vatican, and that would be suspicious even without whatever equipment they requisitioned-- surely they don’t just own all of this shit themselves-- and especially with them all having been on a failed op together like. last week. so either the imf is spectacularly incompetent-- totally possible-- or they’re aware of this operation and tacitly approve bc it means they can just DOUBLE disavow everyone if it goes wrong

oh it was luther underwater! i assumed he was in the van. this begs the question of where zhen is-- ah, i hear her teasing declan lol-- they have her in a Very pretty car, although bright orange makes me suspect this is a decoy rather than a getaway vehicle lol

alksdhf;lkash;lkah luther and ethan just blew a hole in a wall of the vatican catacombs. way to destroy some irreplaceable art history boys lol

ma’am you didn’t have to slay me like this but thank you

ooooh are we going to get to see how they make the plastic face masks???

dflaksjdf;lkahs luther is trying to patch things up with ethan about him being snippy about ethan’s engagement. WAIT until he hears ethan is already married lol.

luther: a normal relationship isn’t possible for people like us ethan: i don’t agree with that luther: then i’m smarter than you

LUTHER YOU DON’T HAVE TO ROAST HIM LIKE THAT (pls continue it’s very entertaining)

The Facemaskification Process-- put a big plastic sheet over the dummy head, input a bunch of photos of the target face at various angles, i’m unclear if these are lasers or saws but Something cuts away the plastic to match

luther has ethan as a captive audience while they prep for him to pretend to be davian, so he’s continuing to harangue ethan about his relationship lol. “23 months” is his estimate for how long it’ll last, which is Suspiciously Specific, luther, you projecting a bit babe?

Continued Facemaskification: airbrushing the colours from the same photos. this raises some questions about lighting-- both in terms of the lighting the source photos are taken in-- does the mask hold up to the same scrutiny under different lighting conditions than the source photos?-- and things like subsurface scatter, which presumably wouldn’t work with a mask that’s built like this one seems to be. obviously you can paint a facsimile of subsurface scatter, but again, that won’t hold up under various lighting conditions. many questions remain.

lol luther is continuing to try to talk ethan out of this by telling him how much he’s going to screw up the girl, and ethan finally breaks in with “jules and i got married two days ago.”-- which is an interesting timeline note, by the way-- and luther after a beat is just “..........congratulations.”

zhen has just dumped red wine on davian to divert him to a bathroom lol

very creepy ethan lol

ah, and now we get a look at how the vocoder gets set up the first time-- he’s having davian read a phonetic passage to collect voice samples to clone. idk how accurate that was to 2006, but voice cloning ai is actually pretty achievable today-- unfortunately, for deepfake reasons.

ksdhf;lkashd;lflkah okay so post-kidnapping switcheroo the cover to get ethan/”davian” away from his bodyguards is to have zhen offer to “wash his shirt”/offer sexual favours and having “davian” take her up on it lol. which, i’ll grant you, he seems plausibly like that kind of creep and zhen looks. uh. listen we’d all follow her to a hotel room is what i’m saying.

fajhdlfas;lkh the center console in zhen’s car rolls back so they can all exfil into the sewers-- meaning the bodyguards can’t even follow her car. “what’s up”

and then they BLOW UP THE CAR, which is going to a) have vatican security Swarming, and b) davian’s bodyguards (and anyone else who knows him) will now think he’s dead!

lovely full team shot zipping away on a speedboat. ethan has “dad taking the kids on a joyride” energy lol

and we’re only halfway into the movie so can’t wait to see how this unqualified success goes spectacularly tits-up

fakhdl;fkhas;ldkh musgrave just claimed to be aware the operation was happening, presumably to give ETHAN cover from the brass for going off-book (well, also to get credit)-- you boys need to coordinate better on who is covering for who

davian Starts Off this interrogation with “do you have a wife, girlfriend? bc i’m going to hurt her” which like. accurate from the cold open. apparently he thinks his best strategy is to Antagonize his captor, which, well, it’s a choice lol

ethan responds, as you might expect, by threatening to dump davian out of a moving plane if he doesn’t get the information he wants. luther has to talk him down-- “this isn’t you”, which is interesting, bc i would have said that was true TWO movies ago, m:i ethan avoided conflict like the plague, but m:i 2 ethan MIGHT have pulled a stunt like this. and of course now in mi:3, ethan is Emotionally Compromised by losing his protege and having a Very New Wife to worry about. which might ultimately be the real reason that romantic relationships outside of the intelligence community are unwise.

luther ultimately does talk him down, but it’s a close thing. (and davian a) doesn’t talk, and b) heard ethan’s first name when luther was pleading with him not to lose his single strand of chill.)

davian gets picked up in an armoured vehicle into imf custody, but given we’re following its progress i doubt he’ll stay in it long enough to get to a detainment facility

on the drive luther has apparently gotten farris’ microdot file decrypted and sent back to him! let’s see what was so important-- OOOOOH, she traced a call to davian from laurence fishburne’s office at the imf. can’t trust any of these motherfuckers

and yep, the convoy’s going-- looks like they’re being attacked by missiles of some kind. (ah, there’s a fighter (? very small silhouette) in the air, that’s probably where the missiles came from, so air-to-surface rather than rocket-propelled) lots of civilian traffic also getting caught as collateral, and they’re on a bridge, so could very well be a collapse coming.

jeez, and a HELICOPTER. they’ve certainly got air coverage locked down

(zhen and declan are both here and trying to help, but i mean. options are pretty slim.)

ethan shouts at all the civilians to get down as the heli squad starts firing indiscriminately onto the bridge-- at least once woman gets shot, luther goes out to try to get her into cover, and ethan takes off to try to get a good shot to do something Useful with his handgun Versus A Helicopter with multiple armed combatants onboard

oh interesting, he’s trying to get davian out of the truck-- presumably to hold him hostage so the helicopter will stop shooting at civilians. no dice, they just shot the driver, and they make those trucks hard to break into for, you know, the obvious reasons

fa;lkdhf;lah ethan’s got to crawl back into his Flipped Truck, which is one good shove away from falling through a hole in the bridge, to get a gun that can actually do shit to a helicopter

heli squad has dropped onto the bridge to extract davian, this foam presumably will either explode or eat through the side-- huh, looks like it sort of flash-froze, i assume so they can shatter the metal somehow

ah okay, the “fighter” is a drone being piloted from the helicopter

ethan nearly gets blown up and DOES get to bodyslam a car. this after the car crash from the initial missile impacts. this boy is coming out with broken ribs and a concussion minimum, he’s lucky his wife is a nurse

ethan gets his new gun put together and manages to take out the drone, which ALMOST but not quite dings one of the helicopters (which, i hadn’t realized there were two until now, scenes have been a little disjointed) on its way down

ethan makes a FLYING leap across the destroyed bridge-- gratuitous lens flare again lol-- unfortunately doesn’t quite make his jump, manages to hold on to some rubble so he doesn’t tumble into the water but it slows his pursuit of davian, who is now being hustled to a helicopter

ethan manages to fire a few rounds at the helicopter on its way by, but no dice, davian is in the wind (literally). ethan calls home right away bc i guess he assumes davian can have her kidnapped Instantaneously-- which apparently is true, bc julia isn’t home and her brother (apparently crashing at their house lol) asks ethan if “his friend” found him and that he told “some english guy” that julia might know where ethan was and to try her at the hospital. soooo great job rick, your sister’s maybe gonna die.

ethan has requisitioned the least-crashed car on the bridge, which seems fair under the circumstances, although i’m sure the owner-- if they aren’t shot-- will have other opinions

oh julia’s not kidnapped yet! she’s still at work, that’s why she’s not answering ethan’s calls

okay the receptionist at the hospital knowing ethan well enough to respond to his very abrupt “I Need To Talk To Julia” with “hey honey, i’ll transfer you” is adorable

…Some English guy just stuck a Mysterious Yellow Dot (which will make her pass out momentarily i’m sure) to julia’s arm and her reaction is just :)? what’s that? sweetheart… no… develop an aversion to people putting things on you without your permission…

oof, ethan literally passes right by Julia On A Gurney being taken out of the hospital, but of course Some English Guy has her under a sheet, so he doesn’t realize

and davian calls to give ethan a “julia’s life for the rabbit’s foot” 48 hour ultimatum. problematic given ethan still doesn’t know what the hell that is, although he does at least tell ethan that the location is in the case they got with davian.

aaand of course this is the moment the imf rolls up to take ethan into custody, so yet again he’s about to be at odds with his own organization. i’ll say it again, ethan: GO. FREELANCE.

this is really gonna cut into his 48 hour timeline also why the fuck have they MUZZLED HIM

laurence fishburne of course is saying Some Bullshit, musgrave of course is nodding along like “yes sir of course sir ethan hunt is a traitor sir”-- ACTUALLY, stray thought. farris didn’t hear laurence fishburne talk to davian, she just knows the call came from his office, which seems to be the same building musgrave works in. musgrave making calls from his boss’ office, perhaps?

hmm, musgrave is mouthing to ethan silently so ethan can read his lips without the rest of the office picking it up, and then slips him something to get out of his restraints. this does not make him less suspicious, if he’s working with davian he has a motive to want ethan out and hunting the rabbit’s foot.

captain america stole his elevator fight scene from ethan hunt. except ethan’s doing it while still half-tied to a gurney, so who really wins here?

escape into the elevator shaft, shockingly well-lit lol

fha;lkdhf;alskhdlk brassel (laurence fishburne, i’ve finally learned his name lol) hearing His Own Voice giving orders he hasn’t given over the radio. ethan works fast. why he has a voice strip with brassel’s voice encoded on its easily to hand i don’t know, but it’s better than last movie when he did a full outfit swap, vocoder, and face mask switcheroo with the villain’s not-boyfriend

oh huh looks like the imf facility is actually underneath the department of transportation, that’s where that cover story comes from lol. df;lkha;ldkfh;lak and ethan ditches his radio next to a boombox so the only thing on the imf security channel is sister sledge playing “we are family” lol

musgrave apparently directed the entire team to the same shanghai apartment he told ethan to go to on Rabbit’s Foot duty

the team settles in to debate their entrance strategies and ethan, Of Course, chooses the roof access lol. he’s gonna Jump from one building to the target building. well, swing, but still. and the basejump from the building to exfil lol

we are at 2 hours until the Julia Dies ultimatum

ethan looking very brooding and cool, and presumably doing math in his head about the velocity and angles he needs to hit if he doesn’t want to unceremoniously splatter on a roof. luther gives him a pep talk which is very matter-of-fact and does not allow for the plan to go sideways, which, like. it will, but we appreciate the solidarity. luther, yet again, for best boy.

awww, ethan thanks luther for coming and luther’s response is “that’s my job.” CALL BACK TO THE WEIRD MOMENT FROM THE FARRIS OP, whatever that weird tension was-- probably about julia, considering the rest of the movie-- it has been Resolved in the midst of this Crisis.

julia if you survive this movie you should have No Doubts about this man’s love for you ever again lol

oof, at the terminus of the swing he still has like a twenty foot drop ONTO A GLASS ROOF which he is now sliding directly down. ethan. babe. i know time is short and options are limited but pls.

catches himself on the gutter and literally says “...okay” in the most strangled voice lol. oh, more lens flare. honestly there’s been so much i can’t even call it out specifically lol

luther: he made it! he made it! ….i knew he’d make it I TOLD YOU HE WAS STILL SWEET ETHAN.

we aren’t even seeing ethan’s actual theft of the rabbit’s foot, we’re watching the team outside wait for him and count down the minutes, which is a fascinating choice that i actually really like. we’ve seen ethan do impressive spy shit, none of that’s new. watching the new team react to ethan’s radio silence, that IS new. luther is trying to maintain chill. declan is Fretting. zhen is apparently PRAYING under her breath. (apparently a prayer she’d say to bring home her Lost Cat as a kid, which-- love you zhen, pls stick around for next movie.) flkah;dlkfha;lkh aww, declan asks her to teach him the Lost Cat Prayer, presumably bc he needs Some Kind Of Distraction-- they get interrupted by ethan finally coming back on the line (things have, predictably, gone pear-shaped) but it’s a cute moment

so, ethan’s base jumping From The Roof was already going to be cutting it very close on the lower limits of height for that-- he instead jumps out a window like halfway down the building, which means if he hits the ground he will do it Hard-- so instead he crashes into the window of, i think, a different building, although it’s unclear how intentional that was given how much drag he was fighting

oop, his chute is about to drag him back out the window lol. having been dragged around campus by my own portfolio getting caught in a wind tunnel-- my sympathies, ethan, you belong to the north wind now

his chute catches on a streetlight, which does him the favour of not splattering him, although it does drop him into oncoming traffic-- that truck driver is a hero for not obliterating him or spinning out and slamming into every other vehicle on the road btw

team picks him up and they’re now in a highspeed car chase with building security while ethan tries to make the call to davian to tell him he’s got the rabbit’s foot

oh noooo zhen got hit. that better be a flesh wound ma’am we’ve had enough women dying this franchise thanks

apparently ethan decided the angles INSIDE the car weren’t good enough and he’s sick of being shot at. being the Best Spy, he of course manages to blow the pursuit vehicle's tires, so they're home free!

musgrave still so suspicious. “go secure” ethan says, “we are” musgrave says, sir. that’s your cellphone and you didn’t do literally anything, if that’s secure i’ll EAT your phone. anyway, ethan is calling to tell him that he’s tagged the rabbit’s foot so that the imf can retrieve it after ethan makes the exchange with davian. which, if anyone at the imf is both competent and not a traitor-- A BIG ASK, I AM AWARE-- means the cold open should have some cavalry coming, hypothetically

the team Reluctantly lets ethan go off to make his Solo Handoff/get captured

ethan at the drop point gets into a vehicle and on instructions from Some English Guy also Drinks A Mystery Vial, which i’m sure will go great for him

interestingly it appears to be making him hallucinate being intimate with julia, and then we wake up in the cold open!

so yeah, it seems like ethan legitimately thought he’d given the rabbit’s foot to davian and his confusion and prevariation here are bc he legitimately doesn’t know how to fix this

meanwhile the team has arrived home to uh. This on the landing strip

well. it WAS indeed a gunshot. and julia does now seem to be dead.

One Must Imagine Ethan Hunt Happy

and in comes musgrave i KNEW IT you little rat

oh ooof. “it’s complicated. you can’t just open the canister. we had to be sure you brought the real thing. now we know.” so LITERALLY he brought you what you wanted, and you killed julia For Show.

unfathomable that ethan hunt is not fully deranged by the end of this movie. i would be eating musgrave’s bone marrow by the end of the runtime.

…gross, but apparently that is some other RANDOM woman-- actually i think it’s davian’s other bodyguard, which, not great benefits there-- they just killed with a julia mask on? i guess that’s good for ethan but also What The Fuck???

ah, bc musgrave is using her as further leverage to find out What Farris Knew.

flkha;lfkhd;lkfahs;lhkds musgrave is complaining that brassel is an “affirmative action poster boy” DUDE YOUR MOTIVE IS JUST RACISM? RACISM AND JEALOUSY? YOU WHINY LITTLE PISSBABY SIT DOWN

“and when the sand settles, our country will do what it does best. cleanup. infrastructure. democracy wins.” god were people really buying that in 2006. i guess that was only five years after 9/11, nationalism was High and the bush admin was still in place. anyway, Yet More Racism from this twerp

ethan asks for a phone call to confirm that julia is alive. amusingly, the fact that julia can remember what the lake is called means it’s Much Less Likely to actually be her on the phone, given she couldn’t remember it during The Party

i see now why they muzzled him lol

huh, ethan called benji as his first point of contact once he’s knocked out musgrave and gotten out of his restraints

benji goes from “you’re on interpol’s most wanted! i’m hanging up!” to “i’m going to lose my citizenship over you” in the space of like thirty seconds and ethan doesn’t even say PLEASE lol

lol benji is being ethan’s on-call gps service. he is doing this At Work, by the way, at the organization that currently wants ethan’s head on a stick, so he keeps having to pause to make Pleasant Office Noises at his coworkers lol. also featuring: The Ethan Sprint

jkhfjkhskdfak a couple of little old chinese men took one look at ethan gasping and bleeding in the doorway and ratted out the villain’s location

aaand while looking around he promptly knocks a bunch of shit off a table. guess those concussions are finally catching up to you, babe. but we’ve found julia!

unfortunately at exactly THAT moment, davian remembers he put a bomb in ethan’s head

well, if he can win this fight with davian while his brain is about to fry, at least his wife is a nurse! she can probably shock him both to death and back to life! if there’s an aed around! which i haven’t seen one, but for plot reasons, probably is somewhere!

ethan has, as per tradition, engaged Emergency Fight Mode at the threat to a loved one! i don’t know why these villains keep threatening people he cares about, it goes SO MUCH WORSE than when they just threaten him

dfl;kha;ldkfha;l okay rolling davian on top of him and into the path of an oncoming vehicle is novel and definitely ends the fight quickly, which is good given ethan has a couple of minutes before his brain melts. also honestly refreshing after the like fifteen-minute fight with the main antagonist of the last movie

fha;lkdhfl;aksh;l ethan hands julia his gun, tells her it’s a very accurate close range weapon, and then immediately follows up with “don’t point it at me” lol

he’s a good teacher! giving julia instructions about how to use the gun that mirror things she’s done at home-- “shove the new mag in like the batteries in the flashlight in the kitchen”. also he is clearly setting up a diy electrocution, which, well, it’s not like he’s got a better option, apparently this don’t use defibrillators at whatever sketchy back alley clinic this is

and of course AS SOON as julia flips the switch to short out the bomb/shock him to death, someone starts shooting at her so she can’t immediately start resuscitation. so ethan is now lying dead on the floor (it’s! temporary!!!) and julia has been promoted to Action Girl!

aaaand since she’s a brain death time limit with ethan, she does NOT wait for the goon to come to her, she just figures out where he is, pops up, and empties an ENTIRE mag into him lol

oooh! and then turned around and did the same to musgrave! well done ma’am, marriage material indeed

now the Sad CPR

also ethan goes from Dead to Firing Position in the space of One Heartbeat

lol sees musgrave dead on the floor and his response is “you did that? …wow” in this very admiring tone lol while julia is still reeling from him not being dead

and yeah ethan kind of has to spill the beans to her at this point lol

apparently the white house is now asking for ethan directly and by name

hey, julia gets to meet the team!

and off they go on their honeymoon!

alright MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 COMPLETE. about as much lens flare as i expected, only “mystery box” that i detected was that no one ever fessed up about what the fuck “the rabbit’s foot” was supposed to be for, but for the purposes of this particular film it doesn’t really matter, it’s just a plot macguffin.

i did not, in fact, remember a single goddamn thing about this movie lol

ethan gets physically put through a wringer in this film, this might be the most cumulatively beaten up he’s been so far. i didn’t make a count or anything, but he’s got probably more than one concussion, multiple broken ribs, has to have sprained every joint in his body, wouldn’t be surprised if he’s fucked up his spine, and also he was dead for a few minutes after electrocuting himself with an unknown voltage.

on the other hand, this is the happiest we might have ever seen him! also the most despairing. dichotomy of ethan. i’m glad julia didn’t die! not just bc she’s good for ethan, she also seems cool in her own right, i’m hoping that unlike nyah she’ll stick around for further movies.

actually i would like to keep this whole team! declan and zhen were fun in the screentime they got. benji was fun and they could use somebody at the home office who isn’t a Complete Twit.

i still think they should all go freelance. luther’s done it before! and the imf keeps fucking ethan in particular over! and apparently their ranks are absolutely RIDDLED with traitors who want to work with black marketeers lol.

i’m not sure ethan’s Ethan Stunts here should contribute to the Does Ethan Have A Death Wish conversation, bc in this particular film most of them are motivated by Trying To Save Julia and he’s clearly at the end of his mental and emotional rope from the moment she’s taken. it is, admittedly, probably not healthy for him to hinge so much of his sense of security and comfort on one person, but it’s too late now.

8.5/10, the style was a little too frenetic to keep track of the action all the time and the lens flare was exactly as much too much as you’d expect, but the story was solid except for the rabbit’s foot contrivance being a little too meta-textually irrelevant for my tastes and there was a lot of good Pathos in ethan finally trying and failing to settle down, and good performances from everybody.

would watch zhen swan around in a red dress again.

#ODE TO IMPOSSIBLE #mission: impossible #mission: impossible 3 #tumblr is harassing me personally with the 30-image limit #there were so many more screengrabs i would have included in this one #it was still not quite as visually interesting as the first but it had some good shots

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