Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt is one of the most famous master spies in Hollywood, second only to Sean Connery's James Bond, famous for his high-stakes adrenaline-pumping stunts which the iconic actor has been performing himself for nearly thirty years. And now he has completed the first part of his last impossible mission in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One.
Ethan's final mission – which he chose to accept even though he wasn't assigned the task – is to collect the two pieces of a key that controls a rogue AI supercomputer called the Entity, which has infiltrated every military system and intelligence network in the world, and can rule the world in the wrong hands. Hence, Ethan vows to destroy the Entity with the help of his longtime allies, including Isla (Rebecca Fergusson). But the mysterious Gabriel (Esai Morales), sharing a history with Ethan, seeks the keys for his own unknown ends.
This is confirmed to be the second to last installment we will ever see of the famous action franchise. After twenty-seven years of movies and shows, there are lots of references and callbacks to look for in the latest Mission: Impossible film, so here are all the biggest Easter eggs in Dead Reckoning: Part One.
More Mask Mistakes
It's not a spy movie without cool gadgets, and Mission: Impossible is no exception, with a tool used in many missions. A staple of the franchise is the latex masks, hyper-realistic print-outs that our heroes don to impersonate their foes. Though, given how many times they've failed throughout the films, it's surprising that Team Impossible still choose to rely on them.
Once before, in Ghost Protocol, Ethan's mask broke, and he was forced to meet his enemy face-to-face. The same thing happened in Fallout. Some characters have simply ripped the masks off the wearer's face, so they weren't very durable at all. And now, in Dead Reckoning, the Entity straight up hacks the printing machine's system and breaks it, meaning Ethan's mission to sneak the key away from Gabriel became that harder. As cool as the masks are, they might be more trouble than they're worth.
Expert Use of the Dutch Angle
Harkening back to the style of the original Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning brilliantly utilizes the famed Dutch angle, titling the view of the camera on the screen just a few degrees to emphasize the unreliability of everything, from the narrative to the characters, as you never know when someone is wearing someone else's face.
Director of the original Mission: Impossible Brian De Palma uses these off-kilter frames to heighten tension since the beginning, and director Christopher McQuarrie did the same in Dead Reckoning to tilt the audience's perspective with the camera in an expert use of tradition in cinematography.
A Photo of Erika Sloane
A little hard to spot, but an Easter egg is just hanging on the walls out in the open. Erika Sloane (Angela Basset) was the former CIA director and worked closely with Ethan in the previous film Fallout before being replaced.
Early in Dead Reckoning, we see a photo of Sloane looking pretty official hanging on the wall of a big-wigs meeting between world spy leaders. Fans hoped to see more of the character, especially after it was confirmed, but apparently, it panned out.
The Great Paris
The most subtle and most rewarding Easter egg of Dead Reckoning is a deep cut to the original television series which inspired the whole film franchise, the CBS 60's show Mission: Impossible, which also followed a specialized group of spies keeping the world free and safe, usually from commies with nukes, considering the series aired during the height of the Cold War between America and Russia.
The original Team Impossible featured one member only known as Paris, a master of disguise and deception. Played by Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame for playing the iconic Spock, the retired magician Paris also served as the inspiration for Gabriel's assistant assassin, Paris (Pom Klementieff). Both the original Paris and the new Paris shared a flamboyant fashion sense with flowy robes, and we'll likely see more of these outlandish costumes in Part Two.
The Iconic Run
There's no doubt that Tom Cruise is the star of the Mission: Impossible franchise, pulling off incredibly risky high-octane stunts for his films even though the actor's over sixty years old. And while Dead Reckoning features many more jaw-dropping, death-defying feats, the real achievement we wanted of Cruise was his famous run.
The good, ol' Ethan run where Cruise swings his arms like coupling rods on a train and kicks his legs up high in great lunges is what we all wanted to see Cruise do specifically, and given the ending of Dead Reckoning, it doesn't seem like he'll stop anytime soon.