Mission Impossible III was a pretty standard action movie, and that means that along with all of the climactic fight scenes and the tense shootouts there were quite a bit of questionable physics. I chose three scenes in particular.
The First scene is when Ethan needs to swing from one skyscraper to the next. A few things stand out to me in this scene, the first is that the time the rope catches Ethan he is already at a point that is equal in altitude than his destination, the second is that when the rope catches, Ethan loses a lot of his energy and you can tell because his speed decreases significantly, and the third is that Ethan is producing massive amounts of drag. So, with all of this in place, can he make the jump? First off, lets give some context:
Initial Building: 226 m tall
Final Building: 162 m tall
Distance Between: 47.55 m across
To make it across such a wide gap would mean that he would need to be going at an incredible speed, but if he is going at such high speeds, there must be really high drag forces pushing him back and to overcome that drag, he needs to go even faster. Based on the diagram he is trying to reach the same altitude as his starting point, so he needs all the extra energy from the drop as he can, but so much of it is lost when the rope catches, along with all the drag. At this point most of the energy needed to make the swing is lost, so I just do not think that the physics are in order in this scene. It is not possible to make the swing and reach the other building.
P.S. Comparing the scene with the diagram above, the point where he catches the rope in the scene looks to be about 15-20 degrees higher than in the diagram, allowing him to have much more energy than he should, giving the effect that the physics actually worked.
The next scene I wanted to analyze would be the scene where Ethan is seen running and I decided to calculate his speed. The first step in calculating his speed would be to find one part of the scene that showed a profile shot of Ethan running with points to use as markers to measure distance, and I used two poles. Next is to find the distance between the two marker, so I used Tom Cruise's height (5'7" or 1.7 m) and measured the distance between the poles using Tom's Height (approx. 11' or 3.4 m). Then I measured the time taken for Ethan to cross the two poles 10 times and took the average (.41 s) and then did the same thing with two other sets of poles (both same as the first) and timed them (.40 s and .41 s). Finally, I calculated the speed to be 18.3 mph or 8.18 m/s which means he has a mile time of 3:16. This time would make time the fastest mile in the world by almost 30 seconds, but a more accurate portrayal would be his speed in general since while filming, Tom must have had many breaks, defeating the whole purpose of running a mile. His speed does not even compete with world record of 27.8 mph or 12.4 m/s.
The last scene to analyze is when Ethan jumps across this bridge gap and should he be able to. During this scene we can tell that the jump is a running jump, so we can use the world record male long jump and scale it back a little bit since Ethan is a male with very above average physical abilities. The world record male long jump distance is 29'4.25" or 8.95 m, so let's assume that Ethan's long jump distance is 22' or 6.71 m. Next we use the same technique as before to measure distance using Tom's height which gives us approx. 20' or 6.10 m. Given these two values, it seems entirely possible for him to make the jump.
I rate the physics in Mission Impossible III PGP-13
I like that you have included relevant images and clips from your movie scenes -- makes the blog much more interesting. We'll reanalyze the building swing scene later in the semester, and I think you'll be surprised to learn that the physics is rather simple and the scene may actually be possible. With regards to the running scene, I think the more relevant point is that he covers a mile in less than 2 minutes of movie screen time, so he broke the world record by much more than 30 seconds. Thanks for remembering to rate the movie physics.
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I like that you have included relevant images and clips from your movie scenes -- makes the blog much more interesting. We'll reanalyze the building swing scene later in the semester, and I think you'll be surprised to learn that the physics is rather simple and the scene may actually be possible. With regards to the running scene, I think the more relevant point is that he covers a mile in less than 2 minutes of movie screen time, so he broke the world record by much more than 30 seconds. Thanks for remembering to rate the movie physics.
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