

It’s like asking Ethan Hunt to build an IKEA bookshelf. The rate of failure on this mission is low.

Here’s what I learned, five screens and 14 mostly wonderful hours later. To help you avoid choice paralysis, I spent the better part of one week watching Dead Reckoning in every format available to me in New York City. Today, with the seventh M:I movie upon us, there are myriad options: you can see Dead Reckoning Part One on a big screen (Standard Digital Projection), on a gigantic screen (IMAX), on a really big screen (RPX), on a stretched (ScreenX), or in pure chaos (4DX). But Ghost Protocol and its antecedents - 2015’s Rogue Nation and 2018’s Fallout, the fifth and sixth entries into the franchise, respectively - didn’t just propose audiences watch the savior of cinema dangle from various extremely high things on any screens, they suggested audiences do so on the biggest, most dynamic screens they could possibly find. In 2011, the Mission: Impossible films shifted from action story vehicles of varying quality and narrative coherence to unapologetic stunt spectaculars with one clear reason to see them: Tom Cruise risking his life to entertain you.
