No mission is truly impossible, and no title is too clunky and long, for Tom Cruise’s enduring badass Ethan Hunt.
It’s been confirmed that the seventh film in the Mission: Impossible franchise shall be titled Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning: Part One. That’s two colons and a hyphen, all to express that we’re nearing the end of one of Hollywood’s most consistently great action franchises. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning: Part One (phew) will be possible to watch in Australian cinemas next July 13, 2023.
It feels cruel of Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie to give us a trailer with so much suspense…for a movie that’s still a torturously long wait away. The extremely slowed-down version of Lalo Schifirin’s iconic theme song tells us that things are about to get very real for Ethan, Rebecca Ferguson’s MI6 agent Ilsa, Simon Pegg’s steadfast Benji, Ving Rhames as Ethan’s closest friend Luther, and new gal Hayley Atwell as the mysterious Grace.
You might already know that Schifirin’s score was based on the Morse code for MI: “_ _ ..” To hear it slowed waayyy down as Ethan drives a motorcycle off a cliff, his body stiff as he sails towards rocks below, tells us that some kind of…Dead Reckoning is on the horizon. Esai Morales seems to be having a better go than the previous six villains of getting under the team’s skin.
The trailer has a bunch of scenes and moments that are quite reminiscent of other action hits. There’s a close call on top of a speeding train in a tunnel (Speed), the aforementioned forest bike scenes in some dense European-looking woods (No Time To Die), neon-lit club scenes in a Middle Eastern setting (John Wick: Parabellum), and a SWAT team even invades what looks like the sand-filled homes from that Tame Impala cover. Neato.
One especially referential stunt shows a steam train tumbling off a broken bridge to the waters below, a salute to Buster Keaton’s The General, and it’s that moment that briefly caused international controversy, when the Mission: Impossible 7 filmmakers were accused of recklessly destroying an actual historical bridge in Poland. McQuarrie explained that only unsafe parts of the bridge with existing damage were ever at risk, and that there was “no disrespect intended”.
