Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
2011 · Brad Bird · Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how wide the frame stays during the Burj Khalifa climb. (camera)
Robert Elswit keeps Cruise and the half-mile drop in the same shot instead of cutting close, holding performer and hazard together.
Payoff: You can read the actual distance and risk yourself, rather than have it dictated by editing.
Listen for near-silence before each action beat, then the score surging in. (sound)
Giacchino drops to wind, glove creaks, and breathing before letting the orchestra swell, a rhythm Bird repeats across every set piece.
Payoff: The quiet lets the stakes register in your body before the music tells you how to feel.
Notice how each location's exits and threats get shown before chaos starts. (staging)
Bird lays out entrances, sightlines, and who threatens whom before a plan breaks down, an animator's habit carried from Pixar into live action.
Payoff: Because the map is drawn first, the reversal when it breaks actually makes sense to you. In the reading: action-image. Deleuze called this the action-image: a legible situation the body can actually act on, not fragmented into pure impact.
Wait for a gadget to fail at the exact worst moment. (structure)
Gloves lose grip, a holographic screen glitches, a magnetic rig drops, nearly every tool stutters right when Hunt needs it most.
Payoff: Triumph then depends on nerve and improvisation, not the device, which is the film's real subject. In the reading: the interval / center-of-indetermination. Deleuze named the gap between seeing danger and acting the interval; the film turns that gap into its running gag.
Once you have seen it
Look for the image growing taller when the tower climb begins. (camera)
The frame literally expands to fill IMAX's full height during the Burj Khalifa sequence, then returns to normal ratio once the climb ends.
Payoff: The changing frame makes altitude something you feel physically, not just something you're told about. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute / the Open. The reading calls the drop below Cruise an absolute out-of-field: an edge the shot cannot contain, only gesture toward.
Track the swing between vast, disorienting space and a tight corridor. (staging)
The blinding Dubai sandstorm gives way to a knife-line chase inside it; the vast emptiness outside the tower gives way to two gloved hands on glass.
Payoff: That breathing rhythm between huge and narrow spaces keeps each set piece from feeling like one long blur.
Notice that no other body but Cruise's occupies that frame at height. (performance)
Across the film, and the sequels it kickstarted, the star performs the stunt himself rather than a double, and the camera is built to prove it.
Payoff: The image only carries its charge because you know a real person is actually up there.
Carry this in: Watch Hunt's hands. Every gadget in this film fails, so the body has to answer instead.
A Deleuzian reading of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol →