Mission Impossible III

Mission Impossible III is without a doubt an entertaining action movie and it fulfills its purpose in that way, but upon further analyzation of some questionable scenes we can see how realistic the physics in the movie are. 

In the first scene I would like to look at, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) infiltrates a heavily guarded skyscraper by swinging from a neighboring building successfully landing and thus completing the mission. The question posed from this scene is whether or not Hunt could have made the jump. Some key elements to recognize are the distance between the buildings and the length of the chord used in the jump. Neither of the quantities are specified in the film but with some research of the building heights its easy to assume the buildings in question are around 200 to 250 feet apart or 61 to 70 meters. I can assume that the chord used in the jump would have to be at least the length of the gap so given that estimation I assume the chord is about 70 meters. So theoretically I suppose Hunt would be able to make said jump.


The next scene I will analyze comes directly after the previous scene where our movie hero Ethan Hunt has to base jump at an extremely low height and miraculously lands without injury after the parachute gets caught by a lamp post. With this scene I would like to examine whether Hunt could have possibly been able to survive the base jump without injury when deploying his parachute at the time he did. The key information needed to answer this question is the height at which Hunt deployed the parachute in relation to the average time needed for a parachute to be fully deployed. Given the convenient tension building dialogue during this scene we can decipher that Hunt is well below the optimal height for a base jump which is around 600 meters or 2,000 feet. In the scene we can observe that Ethan jumps out of the building and deploys his parachute immediately at about a little over half of the the buildings height and given previous research of the building heights we can assume he is around 152 meters (500 ft.) above the ground. The next quantity required is the distance needed for the average parachute to fully be deployed which is about 121 meters (400 ft.). So without convenient movie tropes Hunt may have been able to survive the jump but not without  serious injury.

The final scene I will analyze is towards the end of the movie where Ethan Hunt has to run a mile as quickly as possible in order to save his wife. Here I want to analyze the speed at which he was running and if this speed is possible. Hunt made it to his destination in about 1 min and 30 seconds this means that Ethan Hunt would have been running approximately 64 km/hr making him by far the fastest person on earth considering the fastest mile ever ran was by Usain Bolt in 3 minutes and 43 seconds. Unless my calculations are wrong I believe Tom Cruise chose the wrong profession and could have been just as successful on the track rather than the big screen.

ISMP Movie Rating: PGP - 13

Comments

  1. Prof. Chris FragileSeptember 8, 2019 at 11:07 AM

    Thanks for remember to include a rating of the movie physics, but in the future you might want to explain your rating. I like that you embedded a clip for your first scene, but why no images or clips for your other scenes? Since the purpose of this assignment was to practice gathering information from movie scenes, it's disappointing that you had to guess at the distance between buildings for the first scene. The movie tells you exactly how far it is between buildings. It also tells you how tall they are. Why might that be relevant? Be careful with your other research, too. You conflated two facts -- the fastest mile ever run was run in a time of 3 minutes 43 seconds, but not by Usain Bolt. The fastest speed ever measured for a human running was Usain Bolt, but he only maintained that speed for a very short distance, certainly not a mile.

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