#ooof.

8. MI: TFR

it’s… a bad movie. i mean i love it for the ethan hunt characterisation choices and the juliaethan endorsement. but. it's just. a really bad movie in terms of anything else? i didn't feel like i watched a good movie when i walked out of the theatre. which is unfair, bc a movie that isn't great shouldn't have the power to induce such sickening grief in me. well. they did a really bad job of tying the loose ends from dr1 imo. and the pacing in the second half was absolute bs. it's not particularly well-made. also it's really bleak to me? ethan literally has nothing left. like. i don't think ill ever be able to rewatch tfr.

7. MI3

i-look. as a juliaethan truther i do apologise. but this movie isn't that… fun to watch for me, y'know? like it does feel like a very formulaic action movie. while this is the movie that gave us julia, their relation only really became appealing to me through julia's non-presence in later installments. barring that, something also felt pretty off about luther in this movie? he really does feel like a one-note character here. this movie just feels very non-mi like to me, iykwim? also, personal grudge: i absolutely love cross-gender platonic mentor/mentee dynamics, and i really really wish ethan and lindsey had more screentime together.

6. MI: Fallout

aaaaand it gets difficult almost immediately. tbh my only problem with this movie is that i simply enjoy other movies better. i will readily admit that walker really throws me off. i mean, i generally enjoy cavill in other movies. but this felt like he wasn't even trying, y'know? i mean everybody obviously knew he was lark from the beginning, so ig he didn't feel like putting too much effort into it. which is a level of confidence i respect. but it does make his scenes irritating af to me. something else that makes me not wanna rewatch this is the julia appearance. ik i JUST said that my enjoyment of their relationship comes from later movies. even so, their scenes in fallout make me almost nauseous with grief. like, it's where i first started to realise how goddamn cursed ethan was. and that changed my view of the mi movies pretty drastically. it's just very intense.

5. MI: DR

again. i love this movie. i just love others better. special shoutout to the mvp my boy luther in the airport scene. juggling ethan and benji (the biggest clowns in the imf) together isn't easy. id have jumped out of a window within 3 seconds. my thing with this movie is that it's a lot of new characters at once (a problem shared by tfr). i love all of them, but i still feel like i needed a little more time to get used to them. another thing that reduces this movie's rewatch value is the lingering sense of doom. this is actually to the movie’s credit - they foreshadowed the consequences of dr and tfr for ethan very well. 15 mins into dr i was absolutely certain that ethan was about to lose everything he'd ever loved. (this was the time when i lived under a rock, so i genuinely had no idea that the dr-tfr combo was meant to be the end). so that makes it a slightly uncomfortable watch for me.

4. MI: RN

my girl ilsa! i really like the team dynamics in this one. ilsa, benji and ethan really play so well off each other. i love benji's evolution from gp - it feels very believable and true to his character. i also find this to be a movie that is very kind to ethan - he gets to keep his friends even when the organisation is dissolved. everybody chips in to help him and he manages to retain all of his present relationships and forge a new one. this one also lets him receive physical affection from a new person without immediate negative consequences - love that hug with ilsa. im sure they'll live happily ever after.

3. MI2

this movie is really fun tbh! i agree that most of ethan's behaviour here is a trauma response to losing his entire team and being betrayed by his pseudo parents. that said, i do think mi2 is one of the very few movies that is kind to ethan. he is allowed to grow and change - at least according to my reading. he starts out as kinda jaded and depressed, and the whole nyah thing lets him regain some of his faith in humanity. also - seeing nyah trying to seduce someone she's scared of had to draw some parallels to himself and jim and claire. seeing nyah overcome that situation must have given him a sense of relief too. i think they had a pretty good short-term relationship and parted on amicable terms. i don't know if ethan would have had the confidence to pursue something real with julia if he hadn't had the nice experience with nyah first. also liked luther and ethan's easy friendship in the movie - they're not bosom friends yet, but you can tell that they're about to be beside each other for a very long time. just fun overall.

2. MI: GP

by my own logic, i shouldn't be able to rewatch this film. it's the movie where he's just lost julia and spent a fuckass amount of time in a russian prison. everything is going to shit. but i love it anyway. despite everything i really do get a found family vibe from it. to me, the gp team is really the best of ‘em all. i really really miss jane and i feel like they dropped the ball with brandt in rn. i think i like gp bc even though it's not kind to ethan, it's hopeful. like, he's having a bad day, and learning how to be a mom, but you get the sense that things will look up for him. this is reinforced by rn where his friends love him and he might get a new girlfriend. then BAM! fallout hits and he's sleeping in anando warehouses and pining for his wife. anyway. getting back to the point, gp is really cool. not much else to say except for the fact that it's my comfort film.

1. MI

it can't get any better than this. like literally. i would NOT have given mi the time of day if it hadn't begun with this absolutely banger entry. the vibe of this one is completely orthogonal to every other mi movie, yet it's the fundamental text for me. i guess it really makes a difference that this is the only mi movie from the 20th century, bc both tc and the movie itself feel very strangely dated. i am obsessed with the cold-war feeling of it all. i love how mi1 really sets the stage for ethan's psychosexual trauma as well as his massive guilt complex. you know how characters steadily go through worse and worse traumas as a series progresses? let me introduce you to the man who loses everything in the first five minutes of us knowing him. like what else could be worse? i love how the movie gives me the same feeling as filtering fics on ao3 for the hurt no comfort tag. i think it is actually impossible to recreate a movie of this calibre.