The Mission: Impossible franchise exists mainly so that Tom Cruise can risk his life doing insane stunts. Most of the things that we see Ethan Hunt do on screen, like scale sheer buildings and riding motorcycles off of cliffs, are things we’d never really see real people do, but some of the character’s activities are, by comparison, quite normal, so there are people who can judge just how good a sniper Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson actually are.
In a new video for Insider a professionally trained Army Ranger sniper, Nicolas Irving, took a look at several scenes of snipers from media to judge how close to reality they actually got. One scene he takes a look at is the opera house sniper sequence from Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. The scene sees Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, Rebecca Fergusoon’s Ilsa, and a third person, all working at cross purposes with sniper rifles.
Irving takes issue with a few of the elements from the sequence. Ethan Hunt’s sniper rifle is designed to resemble a flute, which Irving isn’t sure would work, as sniper rifles are designed as they are for a specific reason. One area where the scene is at least potentially accurate is the area of the rifle’s noise output, as it is apparently possible to make even sniper rifles fairly quiet. Irving explains…
You’re still gonna hear a noise. It sounds like a clap, a loud clap, or if you took a ruler and smacked it on a desk. Unless you used subsonic [ammunition] rounds, which he may be using in this instance, where I can see nobody else really hear anything.
Another part of the sequence, which rides the line of plausibility, is where Ilsa begins shooting out lights inside the opera house. While wanting to do that makes sense, and it was something snipers were asked to do in his experience, it seems that actually doing it is a lot harder than it looks. Irving continued…
Shooting lights are actually extremely hard to do. That was one of our things oversees sometimes, when an assault team is going up on a building, they want the lights shot out for them — to make it dark. It’s actually pretty tough because it blurs out everything and it’s hard to find out exactly, I guess, where the middle is at.
In the end, the professional sniper gives the Rogue Nation scene a five out of ten as a score, saying that while what we see there is certainly all possible, he finds the setup a bit too unrealistic to score it any higher. That may be true, but there’s no arguing that it’s a lot of fun to watch.
Rebecca Ferguson got to play sniper again in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Perhaps in a future video, we’ll learn what the professional sniper thinks of that scene. The Mission: Impossible franchise is currently on hold with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two set to resume filming once the actor’s strike is resolved.