Zofo

I am so excited about the idea of this film. The world will be saved by the unity of commercial music consumers! Just think: producers who don't give a damn about anything but money are recruiting voiceless half-educated schoolgirls with good looks, who will sing empty words set to loud music written for them by the authors who have lost all hope for a place in art - and all this to unite boys and girls with undeveloped taste in the name of saving the world! The path of life is truly wisely laid out, and every bump on the road will fall precisely into a pothole on the wheel. It's beautiful and gives us so much hope.

The film is obviously worse than the previous one. Thanks to spectacular action scenes and several charismas, it will keep some of your attention till the end, despite the length, but not much good can be said about it.

The script is poorly constructed and ill-conceived, every plot twist, every detail makes you wince and wonder (the nuclear arsenals of the whole world are online and can just be hacked one by one? Where did the countdown come from, accurate to the second, apart from an old plot devices textbook? Luther didn't have a copy of the Poison Pill? And so on ad aeternum). The technicalities are explained superficially. The plot is weak, among other things, because there is no macguffin, like the two halves of the key in the previous film. Due to the poorly constructed plot, the characters constantly address us with explanatory speeches - proof of poor work by the scriptwriters. For the same reason, we have an ugly overabundance of flashbacks from previous episodes, especially in the first half of the film. Dialogues are boring, there is about one good piece of conversation in the whole film ("What's your name? - Koltsov. "Your first name?" - Captain"). Many scenes are marred by routine melodrama.

In a way it's all very theatrical: not enough background is shown, we do not see that the world is really engulfed by chaos, we only hear someone saying it is.

The motives and personalities of the characters, even the supervillain Gabriel, are not fleshed out; lively characters created by good actors (Ethan, Benji, Grace, Briggs, Gabriel) are in a vacuum - they have nothing to rely on in the script; others (Degas) have no reason to be onscreen at all.

Ethan Hunt turns out to be the centre of the universe, he started it all, nobody can move a finger without him - a familiar sign of series' degeneration (for example, "Sherlock" ended with the same fiasco, when in the final episode Holmes, instead of investigating, plunges headlong into events).

Of the few things that can be praised: the underwater and especially aerial scenes in the second half of the film, and Benji's evolution from comic relief to a serious character. And, well, Tom Cruise, in his 60s, is in amazing shape.

The first half of the film is gloomy, boring, and incredibly long. The characters are not developed: we don't really know anything about the girl, the guy, or their relationship. Had I not known the film was about time loops, I would have stopped watching this dull nonsense after 5 minutes. Only by the end of the first hour it becomes clear what's going on, and the film acquires some sense of humor. The author's intention is now clear and, well... the idea is not bad, but not very original, moreover - it is poorly developed and presented: we still know next to nothing about the characters, reasons and motives behind their behavior, and it's not always clear what is happening and why. The sci-fi mechanics have not been worked out. This could make an episode of "Black Mirror" if it had been better written, better directed, and twice as short.