The director commentaries on Mission: Impossible – Fallout makes the Blu-ray worth watching, says Dan Slevin.
Tom Cruise acting and flying simultaneously in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. Photo: Paramount Pictures
With most big blockbuster movies making simultaneous home video appearances online (Apple, Lightbox) at the same time as physical media, and with rental availability for silver discs getting ever more slim, why should we still bother with DVD and Blu-ray?
One reason is, once you own a physical copy that you can play whenever you want. Films appear and disappear from online streaming and rental services all the time according to the whims and whimsy of international content contracts. Another reason is that you can lend that disc to a friend and – with any luck – they might lend you something in return.
But for many film fans, the reason to prefer discs over downloads are the extras – all that juicy bonus content (and I’m not talking about the annoying trailers or piracy warnings you have to watch before the feature starts).
Often there will be behind-the-scenes ‘making of’ documentaries offering PR-approved insight into the production. I’ve seen some discs that have early audition tapes for the actors showing how much of their performance arrived fully-formed and how much developed on set.
Producer/Star Tom Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie and co-star Rebecca Ferguson working on a scene in Mission: Impossible - Fallout. Photo: Paramount Pictures
And then there is the DVD commentary – the extra soundtrack featuring the director, producer, star, etc. sitting watching the film – often with a glass or two by their side – telling stories and providing insight into what you are watching. I’m not a huge connoisseur of these because most films don’t bear watching a second time but the recent home video release of Mission: Impossible – Fallout encouraged me to dig deep into the extras menu to listen to director Chris McQuarrie (“McQ”) and producer/star Tom Cruise tell tall tales about the troubled-but-triumphant production that started in Queenstown, New Zealand, and finished, seven months later, at one minute to midnight on a soundstage in Hollywood.
Fallout started production without a complete script – barely even a story – and McQ and Cruise repeatedly slap each other on the back for their good fortune: that Cruise would break an ankle doing a stunt in Paris, shutting down production for seven weeks and allowing the insurance companies to pay for McQ to finish the script; that the weather would hold in Norway for a day and a half so they could shoot their glorious climax (after that the snow arrived meaning crew had to hike down from the mountain instead of helicoptering and gear had to be left in place until spring).
Henry Cavill, from left, Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson in a scene from "Mission: Impossible - Fallout." (Chiabella James/Paramount Pictures and Skydance via AP) Photo: © 2018 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.
My wife, who had never heard a commentary before, was very impressed at the love, respect and bonhomie between Cruise and McQ – every time they mentioned the great work from a colleague one of them had to say, “I love you, too” so they weren’t left out.
You’ll learn a lot about the challenges of film production at scale from listening to these two talk. Also, about the choices that are made in editing, the need for an actor to give three versions of a performance in eight minutes (while simultaneously flying a helicopter) because the director doesn’t know what version of the story he’s going to tell yet, and how they managed to all stay in love with each other despite the cold.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
The standard Blu-ray of Mission Impossible: Fallout is available at all usual outlets for and, I discovered after I had finished this article, there is a special 2-disc version that has all the extra BTS, B-roll and EPK material on an extra disc available as an exclusive from JB Hi-Fi.
