Mission: Improbable

I watched Mission:Impossible-2 the other day. It's a relatively new movie, so I won't give anything away about it. Well, that's not true, I'll give something away, that being this movie sucks. The actual parts of the movie I'd like to talk about, however, take place before the opening credits, and don't give away any plot points (good thing, too, the movie has few to spare).

First, there's a scene featuring an elderly scientist who has some horrible knowledge about the fate of humankind. He goes outside while contemplating this, and looks at some children playing Ring-Around-The-Rosie, and they go into slow motion, their playful laughter getting all distant and echoey.

This happens in movies a lot. Generally, when someone in a movie wants to contemplate some horrible fate for humankind, they go outside and look at kids playing and laughing. Because children are our future, I guess. All I know is, if I ever want to contemplate some horrible fate of humankind, I'll have to settle for a slow motion scene of kids picking their noses or wailing like air-raid sirens or destroying public property while yelling "PIKACHU! PIKACHU!", because that's all I ever see kids doing.

Also before the opening credits, we see Tom Cruise climbing some cliffs. He's gone on vacation, but his bosses need to get him a message about his new mission, so a helicopter flies by and shoots a missile that sticks into the solid rock of the mountaintop. Inside the missile are high-tech sunglasses that show Tom Cruise his mission.

Now, this raises a question. The agency Tom Cruise works for has a missile designed to hold sunglasses and be shot into solid rock. Okay. I guess I can buy that. Still...

Did they have to whip this invention up on the fly when they heard he was going rock-climbing? The message itself states that they didn't know where Tom Cruise was going on vacation, which, considering the lengthy R&D time, months of testing, and patent paperwork necessary for such a device, leads me to believe they must have invented it sometime back in the 1980's, and have just been dying to use it ever since.

If so, how did they originally pitch the idea to their supervisors? Didn't anyone frown over the gadget budget and say, "Ya know, guys, I just don't see this as being very cost effective. I mean, how often are we going to need a missile that holds sunglasses and sticks into a mountain?"

And, every time they heard Tom Cruise was going on vacation, did they leave rock-climbing magazines and brochures on his desk, in hopes he'd go rock-climbing just so they could shoot their missile at him and justify their product?

What if he went somewhere else on vacation? What if he went to the beach? Would the missile bury itself in about four feet of sand and have to be laboriously dug out by Tom Cruise? That wouldn't be too glamorous.

What if he went scuba diving?

Would they fire it into a manatee?