Making the Mission: Impossible movies was clearly a difficult task. Each ensuing entry in the franchise had increasingly complex stunts as Tom Cruise continued to find new ways to impress audiences by putting his body on the line. Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning had some incredibly complex physical sequences, but director Christopher McQuarrie says none of them were the hardest part of the new movie, or his time on the franchise.
Speaking with Empire, Christopher McQuarrie says “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do” wasn’t filming the incredible biplane sequence at the end of The Final Reckoning or the beautifully put together submarine sequence. It was actuallu editing the first act of the film, which had so much it needed to accomplish in a brief period, that it took a lot of work. The director explained…
[It was] harder than the aerial, harder than the submarine. Just the editing and the structure and the compression and the setup. All of those things were extremely, extremely difficult.
To be fair, The Final Reckoning certainly had a lot to get done in its runtime. The previous film Dead Reckoning ended with a lot of plot details left incomplete that the audience would need to be reminded of. The cast of Final Reckoning, including both characters introduced in previous films and those that were new, was quite extensive. There’s just a lot of information and detail that the audience is going to need up front in order for everything coming later to make sense.
And yet, you can’t have that sort of information presented in a way that the audience won’t get bored, because they won’t absorb it. You don’t want it to take too long. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was nearly three hours long. Every minute counts at that point, and if the setup takes too long, your whole movie becomes too long.
There were apparently attempts to trim down the movie’s runtime by excising all but the most important pieces of information, but every change made to the setup would have implications elsewhere in the film. McQuarrie continued…
No Mission movie doesn’t have some level of flaw, of convolution. And that’s all because of the ambitions of the movie. The shit that works, works because of the shit that doesn’t work.
In the end, the opening of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was certainly a topic of conversation among viewers. Not everybody loved the “infodump” nature of the sequence, but some people thought that the way it summarized essentially the entire franchise, before diving into the last Mission: Impossible movie for Tom Cruise, was a fitting way to start the film.
While some parts of The Final Reckoning apparently took a lot of takes and were clearly complex, summarizing the entire Mission: Impossible franchise in just a few minutes is something few could do well. Christopher McQuarrie pulled it off. He got the movie started right, and if that hadn’t happened, the movie probably wouldn’t have ended right either.