I started watching the Mission Impossible series with @orrery and @mawr . We just finished Mission Impossible 2 last night.

Holy shit. I have changed so much since I first saw that movie.

First of, it is one of the better examples of how Woo a John Woo Film can be: Dropped frames slo-motion, over the top, beautifully choreographed gunplay and melee combat.

The things I noticed the most this time through is how scenes are structured. A scene will start with no background music, and just be dialogue and exposition, and the background will slowly fade in and get louder and more intense as the scene builds up and up in tension and stakes until finally...

Woo makes a character drop a one-liner just after everything cuts out.

Its like Cinematic Dubstep.

John also rarely includes anything that isn't going to be seen by the audience later on. Orrery noticed this too, and was able to make pretty accurate predictions, though the details were slightly different (obviously to me, since I had seen the movie before)

The character Billy eventually evolves into the character Benji (He shows up first in M:I-3

Hugh Stamp plays the jealous new boyfriend perfectly, though his partner, main villian Sean Ambrose is a total Red-Piller asshole. I don't like him and found him really hard to watch everytime he was on screen.

John Woo liked playing with showing off just how alike Sean and Ethan are, especially when showing off how Sean is perfectly scrying Ethan's "acrobatic insanity" breaking into the bio-tech lab in the most smug, superior, self-satisfied, Andrew Ryan bragging voice. The effect was most like an entitled trust funt college freshman just out of his phillosophy 1 class declaring just how smart he is and laughing at the stupid sheeple.

Take A Look Around (The Limp Bizkit cover of the MI theme) is still a banging track, and made even better when you listen to the instrumental version. (It was the late 90s. They were popular for a reason. Accept it. We did it to ourselves..)

Everyone in the Mission Impossible movies is a GODDAMNED super spy wizard. Spy gadgets and tech is treated like fucking magic. Magic with rules, but magic nonetheless. And the Veil musn't be breached. Which is why Ethan fights so hard for 0-alert runs. Ethan plays Spy on Ultra-Hard. He admonishes a teammate for attempting a guard-kill (*hisses* "Zero body count") He goes out of his way to disable mooks in technically possible survivable ways, which has to be good enough for him, since he's too busy running to save the world.

Ethan solves emotional problems and upset like me. He shouldn't, cause my approach never actually works, but I see him trying and it just breaks my heart to know there are TWO well-meaning idots trying their best and failing to accomplish their goals without causing a lot of unintentional collateral damage.