Bam, bam, bam-bam! Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to watch the incredible YouTube video below, from Rotten Tomatoes Coming Soon, showing a bespoke camera rig made for actor, stunt performer, madman, and all-around badass, Tom Cruise, in Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Now, just jumping out of a plane might seem a little tame for Tom, a man who’s climbed up the side of the Burj Khalifa, clung onto the side of an Airbus A400M during takeoff, and jumped a motorbike off the edge of a mountain, only to ditch said bike and transition seamlessly into a base jump – yup, Cruise is the real deal – but this wasn’t just any parachute jump, oh no…
In the adrenaline-fueled clip, Tom can be seen jumping backwards out of a moving helicopter, only to be sent into a death-defying spiral, so violent, his goggles slide off his nose and around his neck. But what caught my eye was the ground-breaking filmmaking techniques used to capture this incredible stunt.
The video also includes behind-the-scenes footage of director Christopher McQuarrie, Tom, and the crew testing out a camera rig made by Snorricam. Snorricam has become synonymous with its waist-mounted rigs, which have pushed the boundaries of what a camera rig can be used for. As such, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is the latest in a variety of big-budget productions to use Snorricam.
From the video, you can see that the long (roughly 3ft) rod/arm that mounts the camera is clipped into a mechanism on Tom’s waist. The camera is then angled down toward the stunt performer. As for the cameras used, I can see several different bodies in the behind-the-scenes footage. But given that the final pair of Mission Impossible films are both known to have used the Z-CAM E2 F6 Pro Cine Camera for action sequences, that’s my best guess for the final take.
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning hits cinemas on May 23 in the US and May 21 in the UK. I’ll see you there! Oh, and this article will self-destruct in five seconds…
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