Aka Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th August.
On Monday I saw 'Mission Impossible: Fallout', in which Ethan
Hunt and his team have to retrieve stolen plutonium cores from ‘The Syndicate’
(from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation) and prevent them from being detonated.
Along the way there are double-crosses, mis-direction, intrigue, life &
death stakes and great, great stunts. At this stage the MI films are like fine engineered
machines, hi-octane stunts at regular intervals (and they are marvellous stunts,
I had to turn away from the screen during the HALO jump, as it was making me
feel queasy!), Ethan and his team going rogue at some point, etc., but they don’t
forget that we need to care about these characters and there’s plenty (at least
plenty for a blockbuster action film) of character beats and development to
make us care what happens and want the bomb to be diffused, the getaway to
work, etc. so that the characters are saved. Ten out of ten.
Almost as good as MI: Fallout are the two Empire podcasts with
Christopher McQuarrie, writer, producer and director, which last, between them,
for nearly six hours! In these two podcasts (part 2 is the Empire review of MI:
Fallout) Chris Hewitt does a great job in interviewing Mr McQuarrie on practically all aspects of MI:
Fallout, although, as Mr Hewitt notes in one of the introductions there are
still some topics they didn’t get to or forgot about until after the interview!
Even if you don’t like MI: Fallout, Mr McQuarrie answers and
thoughts and the discussions/to-and-fro with Mr Hewitt give a great insight in
now you make a modern blockbuster film. Like many artistic endeavours it seems that
the best course of action is to let the story tell itself, that you can’t force
it in a direction it doesn’t want to go, kinda like how in sculpture you remove
bits of the block of marble to review the stature inside. Plus, you need to keep at it, the story won’t
write itself if you’re not at the typewriter.
And I did the G2 crosswords:
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