corsonb

I am surprised at the negative reviews this show has received. I find it amusing that The Hollywood Reporter criticized the show for "some of the cheapest and flattest-looking visuals", when they adore Law and Order: SVU and Modern Family and many other series which have worthless and boring visuals even with good teleplays. The fact that this is SF doesn't exempt it from consideration as any other drama. Jax Zhou, aka Pandora, is a fine central character but surrounding her with equally mysterious individuals and aliens that reduce her viability in the ensemble cast is a good thing and not a fault. This will be a cult series in the future.

Nathan Hunt/Tom Cruise: "I'm sorry."

Julia Meade: "There's no reason to be sorry."

Nathan Hunt/Tom Cruise : "I know, but I'm sorry for everything."

I really hope he's sorry for this awful film since he was also one of the producers. But, since it made lots of cash and his Scientologist friends will profit from it, I doubt he is sorry in any way shape or form.

I wanted to walk out after the first 15 minutes (I was generous), but I thought maybe there would be a twist. I waited it out until the bitter end and what a waste of my time it was.

The script was a zero on a one to ten scale. I couldn't believe the stupidity of the IMF in the first 15 minutes of the film. (Damn, it's the IMF! "Stupid" is not their middle name in any other film of the franchise.) Okay, maybe Nathan Hunt has become a victim of PSTD and is generally dysfunctional after the events of the previous and better films. But I waited for that excuse and it never came.

I thought at first it was a big IMF scam a tradition dictates. It wasn't. They really lost the ball in the first reel and it was their very stupid fault (not to mention that they never really got it back)! The IMF doesn't DO that in such a simple situation! I kept waiting for Nathan to wake up from ANOTHER nightmare for the rest of the film. He and his team were incompetent and insensitive (since the bad guys were obvious), but even though I thought they knew that and were playing the great, traditional IMF long game, I was wrong! They were dumb. There were only mediocre chase scenes with completely disoriented paths through Paris (I know Paris and those scenes could not geographically been sequential... excuse me... let me translate for the American millennials : That route would make no sense for an intelligent, so-called "international agent", let alone an intelligent IMF agent) and would have taken over 1 hour and a half even at those speeds. It went in circles and covered over 20 miles, i.e.,nowhere fast, but illogically and very badly.

Yes, there were some interesting action scenes like crashes and such (thanks to the second team director). But there have been 10 times better action scenes in films that don't have a "canon" to follow. The first "Taken", for example, or the first "Transporter". There were also a few (very few) respectable performances despite the crap script. I suspect the actors were pressed into following the script word for word by the loser of a director (and the loser of a producer, Cruise).

I liked the rest of the MI franchise, but this film made me hope it was the last. The approval of this film is just another example of how so very many critical standards in the US have degenerated.

I like this film (acting, cinematography, costumes, makeup, and effects), but the script sucks eggs. Why? Because James Gunn thinks he can write. Direct, yes, and very well; But write, definitely not. In preproduction Gunn took the script out of the hands of better qualified writers and screwed it up. He is not qualified to write like Lucas, Spielberg, or Besson, but he thinks he is and, unfortunately, so did the ignorant producers. Continuity between scenes and even (cartoon/comic book) science was completely screwed up.

I rated this at just 4 because of the horrible script Gunn stuck his fingers into. It could have been better if he had just stayed behind the camera.