Hmm. A blog. I remember this. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, 2011 A lesser, or just a different-in-tone, film would have made a moment of total hideousness way more repulsive. This one left an impression that isn’t a result of genre or story but of style and approach.  Spoilers, obviously. Instead of making explicit the death of a certain assassin, we simply see her exit the room. The set up and the scenario before it make more than clear what is happening to her — not just physically (ie. she falls and how she falls and how far she falls) but emotionally. We’ve already experienced what’s at stake with an earlier set-piece that our hero endured and know that a hideous death awaits her.  It’s a nice parallel with her first scene in the movie — a swift assassination she executes in a mid-day alley. Death treated as not a spectacle but as something that simply happens, maybe suddenly, maybe immediately, but always definite. And its suddenness (the way it happens and is then over with and we move on from it) makes for a great link to the last shot of the film: our hero’s theatrical sand-from-Dubai-turned-fog-shrouded disappearance to more adventures outside our purview, waiting for the next film, safely away from us, leaving us alone and returning us to our own world. 

Hmm. A blog. I remember this.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, 2011

A lesser, or just a different-in-tone, film would have made a moment of total hideousness way more repulsive. This one left an impression that isn’t a result of genre or story but of style and approach. 

Spoilers, obviously.

Instead of making explicit the death of a certain assassin, we simply see her exit the room. The set up and the scenario before it make more than clear what is happening to her — not just physically (ie. she falls and how she falls and how far she falls) but emotionally. We’ve already experienced what’s at stake with an earlier set-piece that our hero endured and know that a hideous death awaits her. 

It’s a nice parallel with her first scene in the movie — a swift assassination she executes in a mid-day alley. Death treated as not a spectacle but as something that simply happens, maybe suddenly, maybe immediately, but always definite.

And its suddenness (the way it happens and is then over with and we move on from it) makes for a great link to the last shot of the film: our hero’s theatrical sand-from-Dubai-turned-fog-shrouded disappearance to more adventures outside our purview, waiting for the next film, safely away from us, leaving us alone and returning us to our own world.