For the last week, I've been wanting to do a review of the new Mission: Impossible movie but I didn't really know what to talk about. Then I saw an old thread of mine talking about Tom Cruise and his stunts and figured that would be a good start.

Tom Cruise does all his own stunts and he has a death with. For the 5th Mission: Impossible movie, he hung from the side of a flying cargo plane and filmed a 3 minute scene under water with no air. Then he tried to beat that in Fallout.

I saw the movie multiple times in IMAX already and some of the stunts look like he really shouldn't have survived them.

One of the first in the movie is Tom doing a HALO jump from 20,000 feet with a Henry Cavill stuntman. At first, I thought just a close up of Tom jumping out of the plane was going to be actually filmed, and the rest wouldn't be. Turns out I was wrong, and the entire scene that's like 2 to 3 minutes long was really them falling.

He had to do the jump about 100 times to get the timing perfect. He had to be the right distance away from both the cameraman, who was also falling, and the stunt man. He also had to remember all his lines, and different motions throughout the entire real fall, which included pulling the parachute of both himself and the stunt man.

Research says this is the only time an actor actually skydived for a movie without a stuntman doing the work or CGI, and the result is breathtaking. This is probably the most dangerous stunt he's ever pulled, even more dangerous than climbing the side of the tallest building in the world. Not because of falling but because of thr actual jump.

In the movie, his character has second thoughts about jumping. In order to get him to jump, Henry Cavills character jumps and disconnects the air tank in the process, which forces him to jump. His air was actually disconected IRL. He reconnects the air as he's running to make the jump and if he hesitated at all, even connecting it back a second late, he would have jumped with no air.

Towards the end of the movie, there's a long scene that's about Toms character stealing and flying a helicopter. All the shots of this helicopter was actually Tom flying it. They had a bunch of cameras attached to the outside of the helicopter and all the scenes of him inside, were him inside actually flying it. He also pulled off one of the most difficult helicopter maneuvers.

In order to get ready for this scene, Tom supposedly spent 16 hours a day studying in order to get his helicopter licence.

Lastly, there's a scene that's not as dangerous but still really dangerous. It's obviously a chase scene with Tom driving a motorcycle through the streets of Paris on the wrong side of the road. This is actually less dangerous as it seems because in many of the shots, the other cars were actually parked.

As for the movie itself, it was beautiful, because of the stunts, the acting, the dialogue, and everything. I loved all the different throwbacks to the older movies. The villain of the 5th movie has a major role in this one, as does the other two newcomers from the 5th one. The wife of Toms character also plays a huge role in the movie, she was big in the 3rd movie and had a small cameo in the final scene of the 4th one. There's also two characters who happen to be the childen of the first movies villain.

The one thing that I didn't like about the movie was the absence of Jeremey Renner. He's played one of the best characters in Mission: Impossible 4 and 5. He's also Hawkeye in Avengers and he couldn't be in Fallout because he was too busy not being in Infinity War. They didn't mention him at all in the movie, they could have mentioned him being on a top secret mission or that he retired, or even that he died. But no, they didn't mention his character at all.

Overall, this is probably one of my 10 most favorite movies of all time and probably the most dangerous movie ever.

Wow, I never knew he actually flew the helicopter on his own, nor did a real skydive jump. That's really impressive, it's like we really wants to BE the character in his movies. 

I actually lost interest in the MI movies, but to be honest, I think it might be worth seeing just to see his stunts, almost like a circus act or something. Thanks for the great review. 

Light Knight : Apparently he did almost die filming the movie.

Supposedly the scene in the trailer and movie where he's hanging from the helicopter and falls, was actually him falling.

But this was said in the behind the scenes stuff for the DVD and that comes out next week so it hasn't exactly been confirmed.

Here's hoping Tom Cruise is eminently successful in this endeavor.

Deacon DeMan : You mean his next one? His next one is Top Gun and he won't even start working on that for like another year.

zanderlex: No. That's not what I mean.