Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise‘s flagship franchise, is generating a lot of buzz. Its recent installment, ‘Mission Impossible: Deadly Sentence, Part 1’, has been a hit with both audiences and critics, scoring an impressive 95% and 96% respectively on the prestigious website Rotten Tomatoes. However, with such a high level of media attention, it was only a matter of time before controversy emerged.
Bruce Straley, one of the directors of the video game Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, recently pointed out the striking resemblance between a scene in Mission Impossible 7 and the iconic moment in Uncharted 2 where the protagonist, Nathan Drake, hangs from a train car on the brink of falling into the void.
In a Twitter post, Straley uploaded two photos from Tom Cruise’s movie and two screenshots from his game, accompanied by the phrase “…the sincerest form of flattery!” and two emojis: one pensive and one with a wink. The phrase refers to the expression “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” suggesting that he believes the movie may have “imitated” his game, which could be the case, considering the striking similarity between the images.
The hanging train scene from Uncharted 2, which is even featured on its cover, is one of the most memorable moments for fans of the franchise, including Mission Impossible’s own director Christopher McQuarrie, who has previously stated that Uncharted has been a major source of inspiration for his films.
In 2015, McQuarrie confirmed to Eurogamer that the famous moment in which Nathan Drake hangs from a plane in Uncharted 3 was the main influence for the even more popular scene in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, where Tom Cruise hangs from a jet during takeoff (a scene that Cruise performed himself without special effects).
Knowing this, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to think that McQuarrie once again “drew inspiration” from the Uncharted saga to create another scene of his protagonist hanging from a mode of transportation. Now the question would be: is it truly “inspiration” or is it more of a plagiarism? In contexts like this, where does the line between each concept lie?
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