longwhitecoats

Spoilery review below the cut; also contains major spoilers for Skyfall. Above the cut, I'll say: I really liked this and felt good about the way the movie handled some very thorny issues, with the exception of Alec Baldwin's character, who can go soak his head.

I will also go ahead and pull the bandaid off and tell you that at no point did Ving Rhames make out with Tom Cruise, which makes me a little sad, but on the other hand Ving Rhames wore some really wonderful hats, so that cheered me up.

Okay, REVIEW!

Gosh, action movies are fun! Aren't action movies supposed to be fun? This movie certainly thought so, and I AGREE. I mean although this movie did definitely have some serious moments and dealt with a lot of serious shit, I laughed a lot at Simon Pegg sputtering awkwardly at Ving Rhames and Ving Rhames side-eyeing Jeremy Renner and Jeremy Renner giving lip to Alec Baldwin. True, that is a lot of dudes--and let's just get this out of the way now, there's basically only one lady with a real part in this movie and basically only one person of color with a real part in this movie, all of which annoyed me--but at least they are not Serious Manpain Dudes. They are there to entertain you by working very hard at what they do.

And what they do is, politically speaking, very interesting to me. I think this movie is the American response to Skyfall, which essentially posited that you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. And since that's sort of horrible, the only solution the movie offered was to burn everything to the ground and mourn the passing of MI6, and then set up a new MI6 in its place which is basically the old MI6 but with less self-examination. It's a very pro-violence, pro-government movie wrapped in a bloody flag that asks the audience to feel sorry for it. The real bite in that movie came from the luminous Javier Bardem and the legendary Judi Dench, whose relationship both drove the heart of the film and had to be sidelined and then destroyed in order to preserve the fiction that Order Is Good and We Should Trust the Government Even If It Majorly Fucks Up.

MI:RN opens at basically the moment Skyfall ends: with government officials, led by Alec Baldwin as a shudder-inducingly convincing CIA drone, shutting down the IMF because it seems to be dangerous and to lack sufficient oversight. After a series of improbable events, the film ends with the IMF being reinstated, and with Alec Baldwin being appointed its (secret?) head. Taken this way, it seems to do the same work as Skyfall: it raises ethical questions only for show, to say it's sorry for the blood it spills until we forgive it and welcome it back. It seems just as pro-violence and pro-government as Skyfall was.

And I'm not here to contradict that, exactly; there's no getting around that very tired formal structure. But what it does within that structure is, I think, new and interesting.

Because the series of improbable events I mentioned previously is, essentially, that the disavowed IMF takes down MI6.

Over and over in this movie, the characters talk about accountability. They talk about who is responsible for maintaining not defenses but rather alliances. They talk about being responsible to people for whom they do not directly work. They constantly declare their friendship and allegiance to one another and make plans together and agree on those plans together. Most of all, they actually act like allies: the heroes have one another's backs and never allow each other to come to harm, even when they're not sure that the other person agrees with them or will act in their best interest. It is, for lack of a better way to put it, a really fucking Hufflepuffy movie.

One mildly unfortunate casualty of this theme is that when Renner's character "betrays" the group, there's zero doubt in the audience's mind that it's just a ploy, but the payoff is so swift that it hardly matters. And it's completely worth it, anyhow: not only does it (1) make all the last-minute rescues actually make sense, unlike in every other action movie, because the characters are constantly working to rescue each other, it (2) makes all the politics ring a bit differently. MI:RN isn't against government; what it's against is being solitary. It comes right out and says that no one person should be judge, jury, and executioner. It says that multiple times, once using the mouth of the British Prime Minister (which is both brave and cowardly: better if it had been the American President, but then I think it wouldn't have read as clearly). It is against any force which seeks to operate alone.

And that's why it becomes apparent as the movie whips up toward its climax that what is truly at stake in all this, apart from innocent lives, is trust. Allyship. Being willing to work together with other people toward a common goal, to be honest with them and to give your life to save theirs if need be. (There's a brilliant moment of this on a highway with some motorcycles which I studiously will not spoil but it is definitely in dialogue with Mad Max: Fury Road in an amazing, surprising way and I loved it.) It does not celebrate the Rogue Nation, which is, of course, a contradiction in terms. It shows us that no such thing can exist, because, and I am not kidding, the magic of friendship will always defeat evil.

That's why I think, despite the structural similarities, MI:RN is actually a very different film from Skyfall and provokes a very different question. Skyfall asks us: do we need heroes? and its answer, of course, is yes. But MI:RN isn't asking that. It's asking: what should our heroes do?

I don't think it has a good answer. As thingswithwings once said, the end of a movie is the place where it reveals its deepest anxieties, and I think the rather lazy solution of folding Alec Baldwin into the IMF demonstrates that the movie wrote itself into a corner: it conclusively proved that operating in secret was bad, but it couldn't expose the IMF, so it hurriedly brushed them under a CIA-shaped rug, even though it'd also spent two hours quite convincingly trashing the CIA.

But the end of MI:RN made a surprising choice which I quite liked: it didn't punish the morally ambiguous character for sticking to her moral ambiguity. I won't say what happens to her, but I think the end of her arc is the place where the movie most evinces a desire to break the frame. If she had been the star of this film, the film would have been--well, much more Winter Soldier than Tinker Tailor, I'll say that much.

Anyway, there are also a lot of stunning fight scenes and some really wizard gadgetry and beautiful cars and no gratuitous sex and lots of friendship feels, and if you like those things I highly recommend you see this film.

(And if you've seen it, tell me what you thought of it too!!)