Christopher McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible - Fallout is earning rave reviews and some serious cash at the box office, and it's pretty clear that audiences all around the world are having a blast with the film. The Mission: Impossible series is aging like a fine wine, and the sixth installment in the series is a bonafide love letter to the entire spy series.
While there are plenty of obvious Easter eggs and callbacks from the other Mission: Impossible movies, we're here today to focus on the ones that you may have missed on your first viewing of Mission: Impossible - Fallout during its impressive opening weekend. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to check out our list and let us know which ones you caught. With that in mind, let's dive into the fact that the hospital scene seemed particularly familiar.
The Hospital Fakeout
There's a case to be made that Mission: Impossible 2 doesn't necessarily get all of the credit that it deserves in terms of how well executed the action is. Nevertheless, Mission: Impossible - Fallout features a subtle callback to the 2000 action blockbuster by featuring a scene in which Ethan Hunt and his team trick a terrorist into giving them the information that they want in a fake hospital. This is particularly reminiscent of the first sequel in the franchise in which Ethan masquerades as Dr. Nekhorvich in order to trick John C. McCloy into giving him the information that he needs so he can infiltrate Biocyte Pharmaceuticals and destroy the Chimera virus before Sean Ambrose and his thugs can steal it. The main difference in Fallout is that Wolf Blitzer is the disguise instead of a supposedly dead Russian scientist.
Ethan Freeclimbing The Cliff
Another callback to Mission: Impossible 2 comes towards the end of Mission: Impossible - Fallout when Ethan is forced to scale a cliff with no safety harness in order to reach August Walker's detonator and prevent a nuclear blast. This scene is a direct reference to the now-iconic climbing scene from the first Mission: Impossible sequel in which Ethan Hunt goes on vacation to rock climb in Utah. That scene has become infamous for the danger Tom Cruise was in while filming the sequence. Even after almost two decades in the field, Ethan Hunt still clearly has the athleticism and climbing chops to pull of feats like this, and luckily he was able to dust them off to save the day yet again.
Benji Finally Gets A Mask
It's no secret that Benji Dunn loves the fact that IMF agents get to wear masks in the field. Though he didn't get much action in Mission: Impossible 3, Ethan Hunt's trusty sidekick got out into the field in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, and all he ever wanted to do was wear one of those awesome masks. Now, in Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Benji finally gets a chance to throw on a mask and pretend to be someone else in not one, but two different sequences. The first comes when he masquerades as Wolf Blitzer in the hospital fakeout, and the second (and arguably more important) one comes later in the film when he pretends to be Solomon Lane to get a confession out of August Walker.
Ethan Tricks Walker Just Like He Tricked Claire
Another example of how the rubber masks have remained a staple of the Mission: Impossible franchise from the very beginning. Fallout features one awesome scene in which August Walker confirms Ethan's suspicions by accidentally confessing his crimes to Solomon Lane -- who turns out to be Benji hidden under a mask. The scene provides a great moment of levity when the IMF closes in on Walker, and it feels decidedly reminiscent of a similar moment in the original Mission: Impossible. Specifically, it's a direct callback to the final scene in on the train in which Ethan doubles Jim Phelps to coax a confession out of Claire. The technology behind the face masks and the voice modulators was still fairly rudimentary back in 1996, so Ethan never said a word while doubling as Phelps, but the core intention of both scenes remains incredibly similar.
White Widow Is Max's Daughter
This reference is particularly interesting because of the way Fallout simply drops it and doesn't bend over backward in its attempt to make sure discerning audiences pick up on it. For those of you who missed it, Vanessa Kirby's White Widow is actually the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave's Max, a pivotal character in the original Mission: Impossible whose forges an uneasy alliance with Ethan Hunt in his quest to exonerate himself for the crimes committed by Jim Phelps. Not only does this reference deepen the mythology of the Mission: Impossible universe, but it also adds new layers of complexity to the original mythology by revealing the fact that Max actually used the proceeds from her arms dealing efforts in an attempt to make the world a better place. That's how you build a world in an existing franchise, folks.
