It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
GHOST PROTOCOL
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)
ROGUE NATION
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II
FALLOUT
MARRIAGE: IMPOSSIBLE
Pretty much how I feel about it.
That kinda sums up the whole series. The best way to describe them is if they were Brosnan Bond films directed by John Glen, which for a considerable subset of Bond fans is probably a delight.
I strongly disagree with that. I honestly believe that M:I 3 to 6 are on par with some of the best Bond films.
Same here. I don't think the above description is accurate at all - though I wouldn't consider myself to be a big John Glen fan.
Flip Rogue Nation and ’96 and this is my ranking exactly.
I never watched the TV show, by the way, so Phelps was always just the villain of the ’96 film to me, but given that Star Trek analogy above, yeah, I can see how that would be a bold and bizarre move to fans of the show.
Now these days there are large swaths of fans who aren’t even aware that it used to be a franchise before Tom Cruise came along. I feel like once he took over there was an effort to downplay the show in publicity to an extent. After all, Tom Cruise kills what used to be the leading hero of the franchise. Contrast that with EON, who still heavily market older Bond films because to them it ALL matters.
I've seen them all, and pretty much what you think of the first 2. Ok, but not great, they dont hold up to repeat viewing! And dont come any where near Bond, for me!
I wouldn’t include 3 in that (I think it’s the least interesting of the bunch) but I’d agree that they’re on a par with the best Bond films. They don’t go for style as Bond does, but they make up for that with stunning action, tension set pieces (which Bond doesn’t really do any more) and very satisfying heist plots. I love a heist, so combining that with spies is close to being my perfect film :)
It’s tricky to rank them because the top three could probably go in any order, but I think I’d go:
Rogue Nation
Mission: Impossible
Fallout
Ghost Protocol
MI2
MI3
MI2 isn’t really an MI film, but it’s still a fun and breezy 90s action film (even though it came out in 2000!) and is more watchable for me than MI3. There’s a big gap in the ranking between it and GP though.
I don't think the TV show has to be intimidated by these films any more than, say, the '40s Batman serials have to be by the later Batman films. We are, after all, talking about completely different eras and completely different mediums. A 2023 Mission: Impossible 7, which is supposed to lure the masses to a movie theatre for two hours of fun, is something else than a 1966 TV series that focused on a constant, stay-at-home viewership by television rules from way back when. The show was great, but in my opinion, so are the recent films, even if they are not exact copies of said show. The films always give credit to the show, by the way. I don't really think the TV show is being downplayed or deliberately erased from collective memory.
The late '80s revival of the TV show didn't do too well, by the way. That had something to do with when it was aired and all, but I do recall feeling underwhelmed myself when I saw this show. I was an early teenager but I still hadn't seen the first Cruise film at that point. The '80s show didn't speak to me like the reruns of the '60s show had. Perhaps enthusiasm for the televised M:I had dwindled below profitable margins and a new direction was the only viable alternative.
The younger generations cannot be faulted for not seeing too much of Geller's show either. I'm not seeing the show in any streaming list, nor heavily promoted on Bluray and such. So indeed, to some folks who grew up more recently Cruise's is the only Mission: Impossible. Perhaps when this film series has run its course, someone will pick up the idea of doing a new M:I series for TV, drowning in '60s spy/heist nostalgia, but reshaping the formula to appeal to a more modern audience; six decades later.
And yes, EON still do market the older Bond films, because that's what they are selling: Bond films. They started with DN and built from there, all the way to NTTD and soon to Bond26. The Cruise/Wagner Mission: Impossible films, by contrast, were intended as something else than the series. I don't recall Richie's Man From UNCLE heavily promoting the old UNCLE TV series either. Different people, different mediums, different objectives and interests.
So all in all, I respect both the '60s TV series and the current film series. One doesn't render the other obsolete. But they are two different things, like '60s Star Trek and Abrams' Star Trek. Shrugging one off in favor of the other is not my MO. They are, at best, spiritual cousins, but not direct descendants, at least not since M:I 2. Cruise's films have organically evolved towards a formula and tone more or less established by M:I 3, and applauded, first by critics, then by critics and audiences. Seeing the impressive critical scores and financial numbers for the recent films, the world is basically telling Cruise that he's doing great, that this is what we want--so please, Tom, make more. Such a level of success equals confirmation that he's doing the right thing. The TV series has had its saying; now, a few generations down the line and in a different part of the family, another wind has blown in. And that will most likely happen again when the next two films are bagged up and released. It is nevertheless perfectly possible to like both of these. They are not competitors, after all.
And with that, my ranking:
1) Ghost Protocol
2) Fallout
3) Rogue Nation
4) M:I 3
5-6) M:I 2 - M:I
That’s a false equivalency.
You’re in for a good time.The last couple of MI’s are far superior to anything Bond has done for the last few films.
No, don’t think so. No more so than equating the MI TV show not being promoted alongside the current MI movie(s).
You should. I do believe that at their best they've been doing "classic Bond" (GF, TSWLM, GE) better than a good chunk of Craig's more dour run. Watch Ghost Protocol for the epitome of this. Then Rogue Nation for something more serious. Then Fallout for Craig-level serious. Then M:I III for lens flare.
It doesn’t make sense because Paramount still sell the old MI series: there was a big new boxset of it out about two years ago.
Fallout is quite simply the greatest all action blockbuster Hollywood has produced since Terminator 2.
For me it’s always been like that, Bond is the only exception, though EON isn’t exactly Hollywood either. I’ve always preferred European (incl. British) movies over Hollywood.
Still though, there’s a huge drop in Hollywood quality between the previous century and this one. The difference between films like Casablanca or Ben-Hur, and what you get these days is incredible.
There are always exceptions, of course :)
I think this opinion has always been pretty fashionable, and also wrong. ;-)
You're making at least two mistakes here: first, you're almost certainly comparing the best of the past with everything coming out today. Just looking at the action genre, I'm willing to bet that comparing the entire action output of any 21st century year with that of any 20th century year will be favorable to the more modern films.
No reasonable person would argue that scripted television (or series) is not vastly better than what existed pre-Sopranos. It would be odd indeed if for some reason scripted series had improved while its sister medium had got significantly worse.
The other mistake is the comparison to European cinema. I suspect you're comparing commercially-minded Hollywood product to more independent arty European stuff. Because if you look at European films intended for massive audiences, it is all abject crap. Like forgotten Hollywood films from the 1980s. I mean, if Germans made Look Who's Talking, now in 2022, it'd be the biggest hit of the year here (and it would also be significantly worse than the actual movie). Or when French filmmakers make alleged comedies about how people from different regions are different (!) or how some older people get flummoxed by the presence of black people (!), it's just several floors below Hollywood's output.
Even prestige films in Europe tend to be populated by theatre actors unaware of how to perform on camera, projecting their melodrama to the back of the room. And the "writing": I don't know if I've seen a modern European art film where you couldn't add or subtract 30 minutes to the runtime without making any goddamn difference to the work.
To be fair though, I'm relying heavily on my experience with German cinema, and Germany never quite adjusted to the talkie era.
I’m sorry mate, but that’s just your perception. I don’t agree at all that European actors overact and their writing is superfluous. On the contrary, I generally find European actors to be much more subtle and understated. I’ve lost count of how many American remakes of European films were turned into something more bombastic and on-the-nose.
Personally I like my films to be slower, which gives me more time to get to know the characters, while absorbing the atmosphere better. I am not looking for efficiency when I’m watching films, it is after all an experience and not a production chain.
This is all personal taste however, and nobody is right or wrong, but I’m overall a lover of Eurocinema even though I like both. Still though, my top 50 is more or less inhabited by European films such as “Ladri di biciclette”, “Le samourai” or, more recently and definitely one that you have heard of as a German, “Das Leben der Anderen”. I fail to recognise where these films suffer from overacting or superfluous writing by the way.
To each his/her own of course, but may I add I don’t really appreciate when someone deems my preferences to be wrong and that my reasoning behind my choices are mistakes. No offense of course, just wanted to point that out.
Great post, capturing many of my own thoughts and opinions. Somebody posted earlier about the original M:I series being familiar and it was through the tropes such as the music and self-destructing tape and some of that. But the series itself wasn't widely-seen after it left the air. I can't recall it at all in syndication when I was a growing up. Maybe on some cable networks, but unlike Star Trek, Batman or Andy Griffith, for example, it just didn't widely show up, not even on Nick at Nite.
I recall that '80s revival but the problem with it was Peter Graves was ancient and due to the writers' strike at the time, they ended up remaking existing scripts and it was always being shuffled around the schedule and not able to build an audience.
The best thing is when one medium can influence interest in the other and that's what the film series has helped with the TV series. Although I'm sure a lot of people who watch the movies can't understand why there's no big stunts and why the plot moves slower in the TV series. For me, I appreciate both.
The winking emoji was sincere: the use of "wrong" was of course a joke.
I also like slower-paced films, and I'm not much of a fan of Marvel and co. My favorite films are probably Computer Chess and Adaptation. But it is, as you say, a matter of taste, and I do think that fact just adds to some of these comparisons being mistaken. Indeed, they don't make movies like Ben-Hur or Casablanca anymore, because if you deliver your lines like Heston, or even Bogart, you will not be taken seriously as an actor by anybody. Tastes have changed.
I could compare The Power of the Dog to some Elvis movie and suggest a huge climb in the quality of Hollywood films, but that wouldn't be reasonable either. It's not like and like. But I would say that if you take the schlockiest mainstream stuff of the last decade and put it up against equivalent fare from 50+ years ago, the new schlock is a hell of a lot better. There's a base level of competence in most everything released nowadays, much to my chagrin as a lover of movies that are total misfires. Occasionally we're blessed with an I Am Sam or a Prometheus, but the worst you usually see is that something is boring or shallow. It's rare to come across acting that's much worse than mediocre.
Again, I'm not a fan of Marvel, but those movies tend to be well-acted, well-written, and well-produced, and have themes and subtext beyond what was common even 20 or so years ago.
My comments about European prestige pictures having meandering scripts with extraneous scenes was kind of a postscript, and again, a matter of taste. But the popular cinema stuff...I mean, I hate Transformers, but those movies might literally be better than Fack Yu Göthe or Intouchables! :))
EDIT: I'm not German, just slightly arrogant!
My controversial opinion: both Ben-Hur and the 10 Commandments are overrated.
Those two films were 17 years apart - I think it would be a touch hyperbolic to say there haven't been at least two excellent Hollywood movies in the last 20 years (and Casablanca was a pretty small scale affair so the net widens further on that).
Whenever I watched the M:I series it always seemed to me that a big reason it rarely appealed was that the heists never seemed to go wrong: the IMF's plans went incredibly smoothly, no-one had much of a personality (the characters were literally interchangeable to the extent that there would be a different one there the next week and it didn't make any difference) and there wasn't any drama. I love heist dramas (which is what M:I is) and a key point of a heist story is that the plan has got to go wrong.
I have read that as the series went on that they did start to do more of this, but I'd already stopped watching by then because it was a bit boring(!).
Hustle is a probably a better heist TV show (but I guess this is the thread for controversial movie opinions rather than telly ones :) )
When younger people who weren’t even born in the 80s claim they love 80s movies, they’re likely only talk about the classics that stood the test of time. I’d be surprised if a Zoomer has ever heard of a movie like PORKY’S.