Spoiler Alert

I went to see Tom Cruise’s latest Mission Impossible series movie, Dead Reckoning(Part 1), as soon as it was released in China last month. The movie is worth watching for the action scenes alone, yet I was a little bit unsatisfied with their arrangement of Ilsa’s ending. More precisely, I convinced myself to calm down with the hope of her death as an approach of deceiving the artificial intelligence. Should her death become a reality, I will definitely be furious.

Getting back to the point, when asked about your film-viewing experience about an MI series movie, one’s impressions are typically classified into two categories: scene and plot. Considering that almost a month has passed since I watched the movie, the remaining memories are impressive and worth discussion.

Plots

The tightly knit MI trio

The footage is well distributed among the actors, with Ethan being the point man, Luther the reliable technician, and Benji the comic relief. The trio is a well-oiled machine, with each member playing their part to perfection. For me one of the most important driver that keeps me coming back to the theater over and over again is the chemistry between the three. I always treasure friendship and the interpretation of camaraderie in MI series is way better than that in other movies of the same genre(no offense).

Ever since they arranged the plot of Ethan saving Benji at the risk of giving huge amount of untracable money to Lane at the end of MI:5 and Ethan saving Luther with the danger of lossing the plutonium at the start of MI:6, I have known that no crisis can make them turn their backs on each other. Should there be any substitution of any single member of the team, I will not buy it. With this premise in mind, my doubt about Ilsa’s ending arose quite naturally.

Ilsa’s ending(perhaps?)

Frankly speaking, I did not expect that Ilsa would die at all when Gabriel announced that one of Ilsa and Grace would be killed so that the chance of him acquiring the key would be the highest under the prediction of AI. After all, we are talking about the female agent who was capable of carrying out the task of undercover with Lane and slained Vinter, the Bone Doctor alone. The scene on the bridge where Ilsa faught Gabriel was illogical with Ilsa holding a long sword and Gabriel holding only a small dagger. The movie did spend a lot of footage laying out Gabriel’s capabilities, yet Ilsa’s failure with her signature move was also illoogical because sword should have a natural advantage over a dagger.

It’s not that I do not accept her death, it’s just that I am not satisfied with the way it happened. Even if they are going to let her die anyway as a result of Rebecca’s schedule, they could have made her death more dignified. I’m not saying that sacraficing herself for Grace’s survival is not worth it, it’s just the way they present it too scribbly. She could have died more heroically and the teammates could have shown more grief for her death.

The introduction of Peggy Carter to the crew

Talking about the replacement of Ilsa with Grace, our beloved Peggy Carter(Hayley Atwell’s role in Marvel Universe) was actually a good addition to the team from my perspective. The transformation of her character’s personality, though not perfectly smooth, was well articulated and it increased my expectations for her part in the upcoming Part 2.

The formidable AI

I understand and awe the probabilistic model of artificial intelligence. By following its instructions and always taking the action which makes your desired result most likely, Gabriel could have been the most terrifying terrorist in this series. But AI is not unbreakable because any probabilistic prediction has the chance of not reflecting the actual result. I’m a little concerned because the movie did not do a good job of showing what the AI was capable of. Since nowadays almost everybody is familiar with the concept of AI, an ambiguous description of the AI might have been inadequate.

Scenes

You can always count on a speeding train

What most people really like about a speeding train as the site for the grand finale is its relative closedness, isolation and high thrill, where the isolation makes it difficult to get support and the speed adds to the excitement. What’s more, the audience are able to enjoy more landscape as the train moving forward(towards uncertainty).

Motorcycle ride off a cliff

Although intended as a selling point in the trailer, the actual visual perception of this scene is not comparable with the HALO jumping scene or freehand climbing Burj Khalifa tower scene in the previous movies. And perhaps because I did not chose the theater carefully(I casually chose a cinema where I worked without doing research) the fighting scene with Gabriel was also not comparable with that with Walker on the edge of a cliff.

The poisonous gas bomb

You remember the explosion of an apparant poisonous bomb filling the conference room with horrifying green gas in the trailer? With expectations of seeing who carried out such an attack and how he managed it but only to find that the man was Ethan and the bomb was merely anaesthetic, I was kind of disappointed for their well-conceived bluffing.

Expectations for Part 2

Upon finishing this blog, I browsed MI subreddit for more discussions about Part 2. To put it simply, some wish Benji had been killed instead of Ilsa, some predict Ilsa would come back in the next movie, some quickly embrace Grace and never care about the bond between Ilsa and Ethan(and the whole team). I am open to any ending of this series and is optimistic about the performance of Grace, but it would be the best if they could let Ilsa back.