WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part OneMission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One once again sees Tom Cruise push himself to new heights when it comes to devising big stunts for him to perform in character as Ethan Hunt. Cruise's commitment to practical effects and actors doing their own stunts is legendary by now, and those stunts guarantee box office gold for each of his movies. The majority of movie theater audiences aren't flocking to opening night of a Mission: Impossible movie to find out what new threat the IMF are facing, they're showing up to see Tom Cruise risk life and limb in pursuit of delivering something they've never seen before.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is no exception, and features all the big stunts that audiences have come to expect from a Tom Cruise movie. From the highly-publicized steam train crash to Cruise literally riding a motorbike off a cliff, all the stunts are performed by the actor himself, ed by an incredibly skilled team of professionals. The fact that these stunts were all performed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic makes the feats acheived by Cruise and the Mission: Impossible 7 team even more remarkable.
Ethan Hunt's Abu Dhabi Airport Escape
In a movie that features Tom Cruise hanging out of a train and riding a motorbike off a cliff, a brisk jog across the rooftop of Abu Dhabi Airport could appear quite tame. However, the whole airport sequence where Ethan first meets Grace (Hayley Atwell) is remarkable for the sheer scale of shooting huge crowd scenes while maintaining social distancing and observing COVID regulations. Speaking to The National in an interview on YouTube, director Christopher McQuarrie outlined how 150 background artists, the cast and the crew realistically realized a crowded international airport at a time when opportunities for non-essential international travel were scarce.
Tom Cruise's run in Mission: Impossible 7 was shot on location at the airport by a hugely talented camera crew that made such a hair-raising stunt look like an everyday jog. A small set was built on the roof to capture close-ups of Cruise running across what McQuarrie describes as "metal sand dunes", while aerial cameras give a sense of the distance and scale of the rooftop. It's a typically bravura Mission: Impossible stunt, but it's only the beginning of M:I7's dazzling sequences.
Tom Cruise And Hayley Atwell's Car Chase While Handcuffed
After tracking Grace down to a police station in Rome, Ethan handcuffs himself to her, so that she can't escape again. However, they soon find themselves on the run from the local police and a team of international assassins led by Paris (Pom Klementieff). It's joyous to watch Ethan and Grace trade quips as they drive through the streets of Rome while handcuffed to each other. It gets even more fun when they have to drive a tiny yellow Fiat 500 down narrow alleyways and down city steps, avoiding a local baby in a pushchair. Tom Cruise revealed to Buzz Feed Australia that he and Atwell were handcuffed throughout the chase sequence, adding the required degree of believability and jeopardy.
To ensure the safety of himself and new Mission: Impossible star Hayley Atwell, Cruise practiced the stunt for hours, as he does with all of his vehicular action sequences. Not content to settle for a car chase where Tom Cruise drives one-handed with his co-star manacled to him, he's also pulling off one-handed drifts and handbrake turns on the notoriously cobbled streets of Rome, prompting Chris McQuarrie to reflect that the team couldn't "have made a sequence that was more difficult to shoot." As the finished movie shows, Mission: Impossible 7 certainly reaps the rewards from the difficulties in realizing the car chase sequence.
Tom Cruise Rides A Motorbike Into A Base Jump
According to an exclusive most dangerous of Mission: Impossible's stunts.
Cruise assembled a team of consultants who were all experts in motorcycling, skydiving and base jumping. On top of the regular skydiving and base jumping drills - up to 30 a day - a special Motocross track was built for Cruise to practice achieving the required heights on the motorbike to safely pull off the jump. Of course, training for an impressive stunt like the base jump was only half the battle, as director Christopher McQuarrie also had work out how to shoot the stunt for a theater audience when it came to principal photography commencing in Norway.
A huge ramp was built that ran to the crest of the mountain, from which Tom Cruise would eventually launch himself and the bike. In preparation for the shot, Cruise would base jump from a helicopter above the top of the ramp to ensure that the markers were right for filming. These drills also ensured that he would know when to pull his parachute, to avoid a fatal impact with his mountainous surroundings. The stunt was filmed by cameramen in a chopper and a drone and camera mounted on a bike that followed Tom all the way to the end of the ramp. Present on the day was Simon Pegg, who recently shared the footage on his Instagram.
Ethan And Gabriel's Fight On The Train
Mission: Impossible's new villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) has a tragic past with Ethan, and continues to author more tragedy for Hunt throughout Dead Reckoning Part One. At the movie's breathtaking climax the two men face off atop a moving train, which is a callback to the original Mission: Impossible movie in which Ethan clings to the roof of the Eurostar. That climax was achieved with a mixture of blue screen, model work, and CGI provided by Industrial Light and Magic. The fight scene in M:I7 puts more focus on the practical side of things.
Having specially built a steam locomotive for use in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, the team then set about filming Cruise and Morales fighting on top of it as it wound through the same Norwegian locations as the base jump. Although it was moving at a much slower pace than an average train, the two actors were still grappling on top of a vehicle that was achieving speeds of 60mph. Fighting Tom Cruise on top of a moving train was a new experience for actor Esai Morales, but it's a significant upgrade on the scene from the very first Mission: Impossible movie.
Mission: Impossible 7's Train Crash
After building the locomotive, the Mission: Impossible 7 team then had to destroy it in the movie's climactic scenes. Escaping with his life, Gabriel primes a bridge with explosive charges, leaving the train with no more rails to travel, and killing Hunt and Grace in the process. Thankfully, Ethan and Grace escaped with both their lives and Mission: Impossible's key to unlock the Entity source code. The crash of the front carriages of the train was shot in the Darlton Quarry in Stoney Middleton, in the UK once all the scenes inside the specially built locomotive were in the can. The train was rigged with multiple cameras so that it could capture the moment of impact at the bottom of the quarry.
The fact that the Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One team built their own train meant that the various scenes of Ethan and Grace hanging from the train were mostly captured on the genuine article. Interestingly, Hayley Atwell believed that her toughest stunts were during the later sequences inside the train carriage after the crash. These were achieved inside a "virtual carriage" which had Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell defy gravity as the movements reflected the physics of the train crash as depicted on-screen. All of which leaves the question of just what Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie and the Mission: Impossible team could possibly have planned for the second part when it hits theaters in 2024.
