Short takes: ‘Mission: Impossible — Fallout,’ ‘Conan the Barbarian’ (2011) and ‘Stargate’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 8, 2020

I was never much of a fan of the original Mission: Impossible movie, which came out in 1996 and was based on a TV series that aired from 1966 through 1973. The 2000 follow-up, Mission: Impossible II, struck me as so-so. But the third entry in the franchise, M:I III, directed by J.J. Abrams, was really terrific, as all three further sequels have been.

The most recent outing was 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, which opens with hero secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) opting to save the life of colleague Luther Stickell (series regular Ving Rhames) at the cost of letting a terrorist organization get its hands on weapons-grade plutonium. Impossible Mission Force director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) dispatches Hunt to recover the material, naturally, but hard-as-nails CIA head Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) insists that Hunt be accompanied by one of her agents, August Walker (Henry Cavill, once again playing an American).

The pair plan to intercept and impersonate a ne’er-do-well named John Lark who has made tentative arrangements to purchase the missing radioactive material. Unfortunately for Hunt, the broker, known as the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), will only sell “Lark” the plutonium if he helps her free Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), the bad guy from the previous installment, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. Hunt and Walker work up a plan with Stickell and another IMF regular, Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), but they find themselves having various run-ins with former British spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), another Rogue Nation character, who isn’t willing to see Lane freed.

The last and the least: ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’ closed out the ‘Next Generation’ films on an unsatisfying note

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 22, 2015

The 2002 movie Star Trek: Nemesis has an awful reputation. This, I think, is somewhat overblown — somewhat.

Nemesis is the film that broke the Star Trek franchise’s Rule of Even-Numbered Outings, which posits that every other movie is excellent. As it happens, I was never a big believer in that rule, not having particularly liked the eighth Trek movie, Star Trek: First Contact.

Nemesis is widely considered to be the worst Star Trek movie. Perhaps so, but isn’t that sentiment excessively flattering to Star Trek V: The Final Frontier?

Trek’s tenth cinematic outing is also widely believed to be the movie that killed the Star Trek franchise. While it’s true that the next Trek film wasn’t released for seven years, creating the property’s longest-ever absence from movie theaters since its 1979 debut, there are plenty of signs that Nemesis was always meant to put a wrap on The Next Generation movie series. One of them is a plot point in Nemesis itself.