Every new Mission: Impossible film comes with a task that is, well, quite difficult. This is a film franchise propelled by its set pieces, and the expectation is that each new instalment must better the last. Which would be fine, were it not for the fact that previous instalments have asked Tom Cruise to climb up the outside of the world’s tallest building or strap himself to the exterior of a plane as it takes off.
But don’t worry, because Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is just months away, and Christopher McQuarrie is already promising a lot. Namely he is saying that the film will push you to the point of a medical emergency.
Speaking to Empire, McQuarrie revealed: “We had a small screening, and someone said: ‘I was suffocating throughout the entire sequence. I almost had a heart attack.’ And I thought: ‘I guess we did something right.” And that’s a selling point, right? You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll probably need to bring your own portable defibrillation unit.
In truth, McQuarrie needed to promise something big. The last Mission: Impossible film underperformed at the box office, and in truth the big stunt – a motorbike jump off the side of a mountain – might have counted as one of the biggest letdowns. The film as a whole was incredible, maybe my favourite of the lot. But the jump had literally been trailed for years. And when it arrived, for some reason masked in a sort of CGI slurry, it didn’t have the same impact as previous films. This suffocating new sequence, though, sounds like it’s just the ticket.
That is, so long as your idea of a nice day out at the movies requires you to have some sort of alarmingly visceral reaction to whatever you’re being shown. And, increasingly, that appears to be the case.
Take the Terrifier series, for instance. Each new instalment vaults to greater and greater commercial success, based largely on rumours that they are disgusting enough to make people either vomit or faint. The latter apparently happened during the British premiere of Terrifier 3, perhaps during the scene where a clown takes a chainsaw to a man’s genitals, and Terrifier 2 reportedly did both.
And make no mistake, this is a marketing ploy. Eli Roth’s cannibal film The Green Inferno was apparently gruesome enough to cause an audience member to pass out during a screening at a film festival, and Roth’s immediate response was one of total elation. “It’s official! We had a FAINTING at #Deauville2015 screening of @TheGreenInferno!!!!” he tweeted after the credits rolled. Similarly, the 2015 film Bite cutely arranged to hand out sick bags ahead of its premiere, and everyone seemed thrilled when not all of them went unused. An attendee tweeted: “I leave the BITE premiere for all of ten minutes and the following text lights up my phone: ‘2 people fainted, one girl is puking and one man hit his head on the stairs’. Truth”.
However, if McQuarrie is reading, it’s important to know that there is an upper limit to this sort of thing. Vomiting and passing out is fine; it’s a badge of honour for the film-maker and a challenge for the audience. But anything more serious than that and it stops being quite as fun. There’s an apocryphal story about the 1932 film Freaks, in which a test screening audience was so scandalised by what they’d seen that one of them threatened to sue the studio for bringing about a miscarriage.
More tangibly, several people have actually had heart attacks during movie screenings, and not all of them made it. In 1975 45-year old Elmer C Sommerfield had a fatal heart attack 45 minutes into Jaws. In 2004 56-year-old Peggy Scott reacted similarly to the crucifixion scene in The Passion of the Christ. More recently, a 42-year-old Taiwanese man had a severe stroke during Avatar. When he died 11 days later, doctors blamed the incident not on his historically high blood pressure, but on “over-excitement from watching the movie”.
You’ll notice a distinct lack of tweets about this. James Cameron has never written a celebratory tweet yelping that his alien whales are so realistic that they will literally make your brain start bleeding until you die, for example.
And presumably this will be the case if anyone is pushed further than the Mission: Impossible test screen audience. When it comes to positive reactions, being pushed to the brink of a heart attack is much better than actually having a heart attack. Although if he really does want to compete with the likes of Terrifier, he should think about including a scene that makes people involuntarily defecate. That really would be breaking new ground.
Source: theguardian.com
