I’m not really interested in entering into a debate on where this particular movie ranks in the “Mission Impossible” pantheon. I do feel this one has a stronger cast of characters than I remember from the earlier ones. Ving Rhames is always fun, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is convincing as a sophisticated, yet heartless dealer of mayhem. Given the title of the franchise, I guess we can’t expect too much in the way of realistic physics (action-thrillers are usually lacking in this area anyway), yet it’s worth noting that the MI movies follow the James Bond movies in playing up the roles of high-tech gizmos and the techno-nerds behind them. It’s a cliched, yet powerful message, that the ultimate prize in “Mission Impossible III” isn’t money, gold, diamonds, or artwork, but some powerful creation of science (cleverly undisclosed, so the plot can’t go out of date with any future discovery). It is presumed to be a weapon, but we don’t even know that for sure by the end of the movie (remember, there are thriving black markets for many things other than weapons).
Anyway, it’s important to remember that we’re not to the point in the semester yet where we’re ready to judge good or bad physics (although most of you probably already know enough to make some good guesses). Before we can begin applying the laws of physics we need to learn how to make scientific observations – these will be our “experiments.” To make a useful observation, you first need to decide what to observe. Not everything happening in the world around you or in a movie scene is relevant to the questions you are trying to answer at the time. For instance, if you’re trying to figure out if a person really can basejump off a building, it’s not terribly relevant what city the building is in or what time of day it is. More relevant are how tall the building is and how quickly the person can get their chute deployed. Once you’ve filtered the relevant from the irrelevant information, you can set about the task of actually making your measurements. In movie scenes, this isn’t always easy. You can’t pull out a measuring stick or put the object in question on a scale. You may need to step through scenes one frame at a time so you can carefully analyze the images. You may need to estimate unknown lengths in scenes by using objects of known size that are also in the scene to set the scale. You may occasionally need to resort to outside resources to help you. For instance, in our example, you may need to go online to look up how tall the building in question is or how long a basejump chute needs to be deployed to sufficiently slow a jumper’s descent. Finally, you may have to make some educated guesses.
Assignment: This week I want you to analyze at least 3 scenes from the movie “Mission Impossible III.” I want you to: 1) state what physical question you are trying to answer in each scene; 2) state what the relevant quantities are you would need to measure to answer your posed questions; and 3) give me your best estimates for those quantities and some explanation of how you came up with your estimates. To make things more consistent for me, I would like everyone to use the scene of agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) swinging from one building to another in Shanghai as one of the scenes you analyze. Other scenes you might consider are the helicopter chase scenes, the drone aircraft attack on the bridge, or agent Hunt’s base jump from the building in Shanghai. Or choose some of your own scenes. In making your estimates, you can use whatever units you like (whatever is convenient for you, just don’t forget to include units). For instance, you might use the common American unit of a foot for measuring length. However, I also want you to convert your measurements into metric units (meters, kilograms, seconds, etc.) There are a variety of tools available on the web to help you do this. REMEMBER, the point of this assignment is NOT to measure every possible quantity in a scene, it’s to measure the relevant quantities. So at least half of the task on this assignment is judging what’s relevant. And you can only do that AFTER you’ve decided what question you’re trying to answer.
Please post your answers to your blog by Sunday, 1 Sep. BE SURE TO RANK THE PHYSICS IN THIS MOVIE ACCORDING TO THE ISMP MOVIE PHYSICS RATING SYSTEM.
