What are you watching?

[starschwar]

I finally got around to the last two Mission: Impossible movies.  Terrible writing and some other factors easily make them the weakest of what was otherwise a good-to-great series until this point.  I wouldn't recommend *starting* with these for novices.  Honestly, unless they make another, I would normally just recommend stopping after the excellent sixth film, Fallout.

However.  For as bad as the two Reckoning movies are, I was surprised to find a number of plot points borrowed from Metal Gear!  Most especially Sons of Liberty and Guns of the Patriots.  They aren't handled nearly as artfully or meaningfully as Kojima did, but gave me an interesting sense of deja vu.

I actually saw loads of people on MGS Twitter comparing the two when logged onto the forum's account. Though they seemed a lot more positive about it than you I won't lie.

I've never actually seen any of the Mission Impossible films. I have wanted to check them out.

While I think that the lore introduced in the newer films retroactively diminishes the plots and characters of the previous films, that doesn't ruin them forever. It just makes me like the newer ones less, if that makes sense. The first two have some glitches - the first one will absolutely get on your bad side if you have any amount of history with the original TV series, and the final action scene looks really fake.  The series went on to pride itself on practical effects and stunts, so it stands out as very artificial to me.  The second movie has a pretty dull first half, and then lets director John Woo fully off the chain for the second.  All of this awash in pure "This was made in the year 2000" stylistic excess.  It has a lot of redeeming qualities beyond that, but it does stand out as being very different from the rest.

But 3-6?  That's one of the best runs of any action/adventure series, especially in recent memory. 

If you can put up with some early teething (the first movie winds up being very important down the line), it's a series that's well worth your time.