Christopher McQuarrie
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The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Visuals Plot
Here director Christopher McQuarrie, who directed Cruise in Jack Reacher, has his own Hitchcock moves - in a scene set against a performance of Turandot in the Vienna State Opera which recalls the Royal Albert Hall assassination scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much - the 1956 movie, which, like Rogue Nation also takes an excursion to Morocco.
Ethan must foil an elaborate assassination attempt during opening night at the Vienna State Opera (clearly inspired by a similar setup in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much”).
McQuarrie is working from the template of classic James Bond movies and Alfred Hitchcock suspense films like 1956’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” whose Albert Hall assassination sequence “Rogue Nation” borrows and amplifies about a third of the way in.
Indeed there’s a sequence at the Vienna State Opera that’s a clear homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much” that has no less than three shooters involved in an assassination plot with Ethan and Benji trying to thwart them.
Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie sets up an elaborate assassination sequence that deliberately references Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much.
During one of my favorite scenes, Benji helps out Ethan backstage during a performance of the Puccini opera “Turandot,” Hunt tries to foil an assassination (Hitchcock fans are sure to recognize several nods to “The Man Who Knew Too Much”).
Casablanca (1943)
Directed by Michael Curtiz
influenced Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Characters
However, when Hunt and the team have to infiltrate secure location in Casablanca in Morocco, you can’t help but see that McQuarrie isn’t merely echoing the location of the canonical Casablanca, that inspired the title of his Oscar winning screenplay (The Usual Suspects), but also constructing a comparable mix of players toying with establishment and rebellion.
The scene recalls the best of Hitchcock and is one of many sequences that references classic films, including “Casablanca.”
The real revelation here is Ferguson (previously seen in Hercules and TV's The White Queen ), whose striking similarity to Casablanca legend Ingrid Bergman is none-too-subtly referenced by her character’s name and the significance of Morocco.
Reserved and somehow remote, she's also ferociously confident and utterly stunning, an action-woman update of Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (the name Ilsa is presumably not a coincidence).
The Casablanca setting was clearly fashioned around female lead Rebecca Ferguson, who’s Swedish, because of that other Swedish actress, Ingrid Bergman, who made a little movie called “Casablanca.”
Ilsa, her name no doubt cribbed from the heroine in “Casablanca,” whose real-life city is one of the major locales for “Rogue Nation,” saves his life twice yet she works for the other team.
The Hunt for Red October (1990)
Directed by John McTiernan
influenced Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Dialogue Visuals
Director Christopher McQuarrie also borrows a linguistic device from The Hunt for Red October – starting with Russian speech then quickly moving to all characters speaking English.
That scene gives me the claustrophobic vibes of The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide-like moment.
Commencée en pré-générique dans une longue séquence à l’intérieur d’un sous-marin évoquant The Hunt for Red October ( À la poursuite d’Octobre rouge) de John McTiernan, ce septième épisode de la série cinéma des Mission : Impossible nous transporte très rapidement dans le désert de la péninsule arabique puis dans un aéroport ultra-moderne.
It also doesn’t help that Baldwin previously played Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, and then you put him in lots of scenes with The Bourne Legacy’s Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) and you’re reminded of far more distinctive uses of the spy thriller genre.
The General (1926)
Directed by Clyde Bruckman
influenced Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Visuals
Those cartoonish aspects are riotously reinforced, though, in a climactic train sequence that’s as much a straightforward action showstopper as it is a tribute to Buster Keaton’s The General , with Ethan and others frantically attempting to reckon with a runaway locomotive careens toward a ravine.
Once the train gets going, we see how everything gets set up to build for the moment where McQuarrie and Cruise get to a climactic moment that pays homage to Buster Keaton’s “The General,” but with a modern twist.
After that, the narrative doesn’t reach that same high tension, though action fans will surely lap up two exceptional extended set-pieces—an elaborate car chase through Rome and a pulsating Orient Express finale that cinephiles with a good knowledge of film history would surely cite The General (1926) as ‘inspiration’.
A climactic train sequence even calls The General to mind.
The Third Man (1949)
Directed by Carol Reed
influenced Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
Themes Visuals
While Rogue Nation nodded to Casablanca , here McQuarrie pays tribute to the subterranean scramble of The Third Man , another European-set thriller of reversals and betrayals and cracked moral worldviews.
Even in Fallout, the entire second act seems structured as an elaborate homage to the France of Carol Reed’s The Third Man.
The deranged mass murderer has of course been a regular figure in American cinema for nearly 50 years, ever since Peter Bogdanovich's 1967 directorial debut, Targets , a low-budget film inspired by the appalling incident on the University of Texas's Austin campus the previous year.
(The scene, reminiscent of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, is chilling in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., massacre; the movie’s big Pittsburgh premiere was canceled last weekend.)
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Directed by Roger Spottiswoode
influenced Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Themes Plot
The MacGuffin driving the plot is all very contemporary, even if it’s truth-manipulation themes are rather reminiscent of the 1997 Bond entry Tomorrow Never Dies .
The car chase on the Spanish Steps wouldn’t have been half as memorable without Hunt and Grace awkwardly navigating being handcuffed together (perhaps in a nod to Tomorrow Never Dies ?) and the breathtaking motorbike / parachute stunt is grounded in reality by Ethan snapping at Benji “I’m trying to get away from the mountain!”
And his direction makes references to not only "Mission: Impossibles" past (the rock climbing sequence from "M:I-2" gets a nod) but also Christopher Nolan's "Batman" films and the bathroom brawl from James Cameron's "True Lies."
It rivals the bathhouse sequence in Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises,” while reminding us of the tongue-in-cheek fun that pushed Cameron’s “True Lies” gleefully forward.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Directed by George Miller
influenced Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018), Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Visuals
It seems to be getting better with every installment not because these are actually better genre movies – they’re not in the same league as a Mad Max: Fury Road or The Raid: Redemption – but because they remain loyal to a form that an entire generation has been forced to outlive.
But such descriptions don’t do them justice: this Paris set-piece is a car chase in the same way that Mad Max: Fury Road is basically a car chase.
There are a lot of comparisons to Mad Max: Fury Road in quality, and not to sound hyperbolic, but there are moments here that recall great Spielberg action at its best.
Mad Max: Fury Road reset the potential of the blockbuster, with an artistic flair and madness never before seen; M:I 6 can be considered in the same class.
Fallout is the best action film since Mad Max: Fury Road , and it’s unique in the big-screen history of Mission: Impossible , in that it’s the first episode to be helmed by a return director—Christopher McQuarrie, who spearheaded 2015’s stellar Rogue Nation .
What Mission: Impossible - Fallout brings to the table is the best action choreography I’ve seen since Mad Max: Fury Road and a serviceably twisty espionage plot.
While these evoke any number of previous films, “Bullitt” and “The French Connection” spring most immediately to mind, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (“The Usual Suspects”) stages them all in an exciting and fresh manner.
Another action sequence that delivers the goods and doesn’t cheat is an extended nocturnal car chase through Pittsburgh streets that harks back to the propulsive realism of Bullitt and The French Connection days; it’s no coincidence that the car Reacher drives is a 1970 Chevy Chevelle.
Cruise, one assumes, didn’t want to don a cowboy hat and pair up with an ape, so instead would have noted that the middle aged Eastwood was also between Dirty Harry sequels during this problematic period.
Reacher's bigscreen debut opens with a public shooting, a nasty bit of business depicted "Dirty Harry"-style through the scope of the sniper's rifle.
Based on the Lee Childs novel “One Shot,” the story revolves around Jack Reacher’s efforts to solve a crime involving James Barr (Joseph Sikora, a tweaky military-trained sniper accused of taking out a group of civilians — think the opening sequence of “Dirty Harry.”
This surprisingly rated-“PG-13” film on its relatively low $60-million budget is an attempted cross between Tyler Perry’s “Alex Cross,” “Dirty Harry” and – dare I even utter his name?
Charade (1963)
Directed by Stanley Donen
influenced Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Visuals
Half of "Rogue Nation" belongs to the digital realm of trickery; the other half delivers a more gratifying combination of bodies in space, usually going at each other, along with crosses, double-crosses and settings reminiscent of everything from the 1966-1973 TV show to Hitchcock to Stanley Donen's "Charade."
Unfortunately, it never does anything except refer to them, and the riffs -- even the good ones -- seem more like rip-off than homages: the gun battle from The Wild Bunch, the coffee-shop truce from Heat, the sniper from The Usual Suspects.
Usual Suspects writer McQuarrie turns writer-director for this twisted crime thriller that’s part Peckinpah and part Coen Brothers, with all the gunplay from Heat thrown in.
Sarno and Longbaugh have a conversation in the midst of the hostage crisis, not unlike the conversation between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in "Heat."
In one of the film's more rewarding moments, Caan confronts Del Toro in a scene that could easily have been inspired by the brief-but-powerful DeNiro-Pacino confrontation in "Heat."
The First Great Train Robbery (1978)
Directed by Michael Crichton
influenced Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Visuals
The opening gambit with the plane recalls Sean Connery atop the moving locomotive in the '70s adventure "The Great Train Robbery."
Like so many action films of the last 15 years — not to mention all iterations of the Jack Reacher franchise — the Accountant movies are superhero films for audiences who can’t take capes and spandex seriously.
…the rest of the film is fairly decent and much as one would expect from an Equalizer or Reacher.
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced The Way of the Gun (2000)
Visuals Plot
(This is very much Tarantino territory, as is a really gruesome torture sequence which, happily, doesn't go on quite so long as its obvious inspiration in "Reservoir Dogs"--but McQuarrie doesn't pull it off nearly as well.)
Back in 1992, when Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs introduced the Mexican standoff guys with guns, locked and loaded, at point-blank face-off to viewers who had never seen a John Woo film, it seemed crazy, thrilling, and funky-metaphorical (those guns weren't just weapons they were the characters' wills).
Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe star, as Mr. Longbaugh and Mr. Parker (the "mister" is a reminder of " Reservoir Dogs ").
A threepenny opera of lurid plot turns, oceanic bloodletting, and pseudo-existential dialogue, Way is a late entry in the cycle of Tarantino-influenced crime flicks that came out in the years following Reservoir Dogs .
The Coen brothers added their quirky touch to the film noir thriller "Blood Simple," while Quentin Tarantino went for the buckets-of-blood approach in 1992's "Reservoir Dogs."
Moonraker (1979)
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
influenced Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Characters
She is Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson, reminiscent of Lois Chiles from 1979's Moonraker).
The sequence recalls John Goodman, William Forsythe, and Nicolas Cage trashing a trailer in Raising Arizona.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025), Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Themes Characters
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey…
There’s this thing called The Entity, which is basically HAL 9000 meets The Matrix.
Unfortunately, unlike say Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey , The Entity is not that compelling of a villain.
In the decades since “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the general public has developed real concerns about such technology.
Quando o assunto parte para tecnologia e Inteligência Artificial, o espectador pode se sentir tanto familiar com o assunto por já ter visto outras vezes em outros filmes, seja a Skynet de “The Terminator” ou o HAL 9000 de “2001: A Space Odyssey“, como por essa ser uma discussão diária agora que o Chat GPT está em alta e as pessoas estão deslumbradas com toda e qualquer coisa gerada por IA, de fotos da sua avó vestindo a roupa do Rambo até uma foto mostrando como seriam seus filhos.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025), Jack Reacher (2012)
Visuals
Think WarGames meets a modern day Raiders of the Lost Ark…
…delivering the sort of breathtaking excitement seen in other popular action adventure flicks from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Jurassic Park.
Raiders of the Lost Ark, First Blood, shit, even The Bourne Identity – those were titles, people calling them “Rambo” came later.