Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Editor Talks Reshaping the Films Nearly Four-Hour First Cut

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” now playing in theaters.

“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’s” jaw-dropping train sequence in the film’s third act features Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt fighting Esai Morales’ Gabriel on the roof of a locomotive as it hurtles down a track at 60 mph. The set piece was originally supposed to be much longer.

The scene climaxes with the train plunging off a bridge one carriage at a time during which Ethan and Grace (Hayley Atwell) cling on for dear life as they climb back up through the train.

The film’s editor, Eddie Hamilton, says he first built a version of that entire sequence back in 2022. That whole train sequence, he says, “was about an hour-and-a-half long in our first iteration. We got it down to like 50 minutes in the finished movie.”

The part where the carriages start falling into the ravine was originally over three minutes long. But Hamilton trimmed it down after he and director Christopher McQuarrie screened the film for test audiences: “It was originally a bit longer and we lifted a few sections out because they were saying it was too much.”

Hamilton is no stranger to editing Tom Cruise films; he cut last year’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” as well as “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” and “Mission: Impossible – Fallout.” The editor shares that he and McQuarrie “went through that scene dozens of times.” The key was that the action needed to be non-stop.

“If it’s three minutes, it’s too long, so we combed through every shot and asked if we needed this frame and ‘Can we cut this any tighter?’” says Hamilton. “We’re really trying to squeeze every bit of air out of the movie.”

While such scenes required fine-tuning and trimmed to get directly to the action, Hamilton found that other scenes needed to be left alone.

At the end of the train scene, Ethan’s foe-turned-friend Paris (Pom Klementieff) is severely injured and Ethan is holding the key to the AI device known as the Entity. Throughout the film, he has been chasing the two parts of the key that would unlock this new villain.

Hamilton reveals he spent time tinkering with that scene: “There was a great dialogue scene. I did a much tighter version of that scene that was about half the length. It was just information, but we watched it and there was nothing there. There was no emotion at all. We realized we had overcooked it. I went back to an earlier edit and trimmed it a little… What you see is pretty much what they did on set.”

Hamilton also reveals that McQuarrie had no qualms sharing scenes to get input. Says Hamilton, “Even if a friend is visiting for tea, he’ll say ‘Come on, let’s watch this scene, tell me what you think.’” He continues, “The first time we watched it, it was nearly four hours long and had no music. It was a tough watch because it was the first time Chris and I had ever watched the movie from beginning to end. Not having any score was a very strange experience. It’s almost a silent movie because there were no sound effects either.”

But that, for Hamilton and McQuarrie was where the fun really began, “We started going through the movie and really drilling down on every moment.”

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