POSSIBLE SPOILERS

The day after Christmas, my family wanted to go out and watch a movie. Everyone agreed on Mission Impossible 4. Some of us were more excited to see it than others (I am pretty much against everything that has Tom Cruise in it these days), but I was pleasantly surprised. It was a very watchable movie and I forgot for awhile that Tom Cruise is Tom “Crazy as Hell” Cruise. It was Brad Bird’s (director of Pixar’s The Incredibles, Ratatouille, The Iron Giant and others) first turn behind the wheel of one of these movies, and he did a great job, managing to throw in more than a few A113 references and make a movie that seemed at least somewhat grounded in reality, unlike MI:2.

JJ Abrams couldn’t direct this time, but he did manage to get some veteran Alias writers to write this script, and I’m sure that helped a bit too. He was listed as a producer though, which is probably why I noticed at least one reference to 47 in the movie.

The thing that stuck out to me more than anything else though, was the use of real-world gadgetry. In spy films and even just general tech-based films in the past, they would contain some sort of fake technology that looked futuristic but which was completely fake, especially to anyone who uses gadgets every day. That wasn’t the case here. In MI:4, they’re running around with MacBook Airs, iPhones, and iPads, and they’re using the real interfaces on these devices to flip through blueprints, make phone calls, listen to secret messages and project video (I’m sure that bit with the moving hallway would be a bit of a drain on an iPad2′s 1Ghz processor, but even that tech (where a video image tracks your eyes in real time and adjusts your view in 3D) is within the realm of possibility now). Crazy.

The future is now.