Mission: Impossible 8 -- The Final Reckoning

Synopsis in 3 sentences or less:

Ethan and his team must find the Entity's source code to save the world from armageddon. 

Memorable Quote:
We live and die in the shadows for those we hold close and for those we never meet.  ~Ethan

Highlight:

The idea to bring back Donloe (the CIA analyst from the first movie) was very clever, especially how they had him manning the station in Alaska, which is exactly what Kittridge said he'd be doing in what seemed like a joking manner. The best scene in the movie is when Donloe and Ethan connect on the plane and Donloe gives him Krieger's old knife.  

Lowlight:

The 17 minutes where Ethan is swimming in the water could have been 3 or less.  

Most interesting piece of IMDB trivia:

Ethan has no lines of dialogue for the last 40 minutes. 

Other thoughts, observations, and questions I didn’t ask when I was in fourth grade:

• A 2 hour and 52 minute movie!  Didn't think it was possible to get a movie longer than MI7 but here we are. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to watch this whole thing. 
• Cool opening montage involving previous movies.
• Nice to see blond assassin lady again, I thought she died. 
• Very clever callback linking the Entity to the Rabbit's Foot. 
• Damn, Luther. 
• Jim Phelps Jr. is a nice touch. 
• Why is destroying the Entity a bad thing, or how does it lead to "the annihilation of cyberspace?"
• After everything that Ethan has done for the good of the world, can't they just trust him at this point?
• Weird scene where there's a deep cover bad guy on the sub, as if he'd be expecting Ethan to come on board. 
• How can Ethan swim shirtless in Arctic waters? Though perhaps that's more realistic than Ethan hanging on a plane while it's doing flips. 
• The parachute was burning in mid-air but then he landed OK -- I guess he had a spare. 
• Still unclear to me who exactly Gabriel was and what happened between him and Ethan in the past. 
• And the Entity stuff is confusing: do they want to let it in, control it, poison it, destroy it, or maybe all of the above. 

Final Analysis:

I watched this a few months ago and didn't get around to blogging about it -- as a result, my memory of it is a bit fuzzy, fortunately I took some notes. Overall though I can at least remember that this movie was not very good. Just as with the previous movie, the plot is confusing, the characters are uninteresting, and it's way too long. They push the "fate of the world" and "every living person depends on you" angle too hard to the point where it feels hollow. Also the final scene was uninspiring for me. Other than the Rabbit's Foot origin story and seeing Donloe, there weren't any highlights or rewatchable scenes. Ranking this one last on the list. 

So that completes the Mission: Impossible project! My main reason for doing it was to revisit the 80s tv show which I only vaguely remembered from when I was a kid. Regading the movies, the first and second are outstanding, and the third and fifth one are pretty good, but unfortunately once we hit movie 6 things take a turn for the worse. This blog will now self-destruct in 5 seconds.