I’ve become one of those people, it seems; people who think about the formats in which movies are “meant” to be watched and have opinions on the subject. I didn’t intend this to happen; I quite liked being agnostic on the subject, and watching movies at home on streaming because I didn’t want to go see it in the theater. But then I watched that damn Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and had thoughts.
This isn’t intended to be a rave review of that film, which has serious pacing and exposition problems and doesn’t really come to life until halfway through it’s outrageous-almost-three-hours runtime. But, at the same time, I can’t deny that the second half did absolutely everything I’d wanted from the movie as a whole, and the final big stunt sequence, as Tom Cruise hangs onto a biplane for dear life… well, that’s what got me thinking, you see.
In the theater, I was into this sequence, in a big way; I was gasping, tense, and practically yelping as I watched the whole thing unfold. On some level, I knew that everything would be fine because, well, it’s a big Hollywood movie, they’re not going to include it if someone died, but at the same time, my disbelief had been suspended entirely: I was not thinking about it as a movie, I was thinking about it as oh my God, he’s hanging onto a fucking biplane and shit the biplane went upside down what if he can’t hold on.
I had a similar excitable reaction to the big train stunt scene in the last Mission: Impossible movie, Dead Reckoning; that, too, had me on the edge of my seat, simultaneously gleefully thrilled and hoping nothing went wrong… or, at least, I did when I saw it in the theater. When I watched it at home, later, I found the impact significantly dulled. Was it because I’d already seen it? Perhaps, but I can’t help but wonder if the fact that I wasn’t being utterly overwhelmed by the image was part of it, as well.
Things do play differently when they’re smaller, especially when those things are pretty much entirely reliant on spectacle and putting the viewer into a state of awe. It’s been more than 30 years, and I can still imagine being entirely stupified by seeing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. On a TV, it just looked… fine.
Of course, watching something on the big screen doesn’t mean it’s automatically a winner — because of my job, I see a bunch of the Big Genre Blockbusters in theaters, and a lot of them are just as bad in cinemas as they are at home (Some might even be worse; Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, maybe a small screen would have made MODOK look less unfinished) — but I find myself grateful for the opportunity to see so many movies in the theater the more I think about it. Not because Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise really wanted me to do so, but because, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a chance to meet filmmakers halfway in offering them the best chance to succeed at what they’re trying to do.
(That said, Lovers Rock is still made for TVs and intimate viewing, I don’t care what you say.)