Tom Cruise is known for doing his own death-defying stunts, especially in his Mission: Impossible franchise but at least one expert on that kind of work has some questions about one of his most iconic stunts. Although he was part of some major stunts in the past, including his free solo climbing in Mission: Impossible II, it was in 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol when he really started to take things to the next level.

In that fourth installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise’s biggest, most memorable stunt saw him climb up the side of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, in Dubai. As fun, intense, and as entertaining as the scene is, one former CIA gadget-maker took the time to analyze the moment and discuss how realistic the entire thing actually is.

CIA Gadget-Maker Calls Burj Khalifa Scene “Great Theater” But Not Too Realistic

Her Issues Were More With The Plan Itself

Former CIA gadget-maker Dawn Meyerriecks retired in 2021 as the director of science and technology. She’s basically a real life Q from the James Bond movies, making her one of the leading experts involving any kind of gadget usage that agents use while out in the field. That makes her an ideal person to sit back and watch memorable film scenes to analyze how plausible they are. Whenever watching something like a Mission: Impossible movie, we often wonder if the big stunts could happen in real life and Meyerriecks can confirm or deny that.

In a recent video, Meyerriecks watched the pivotal scene in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol to discuss how much of it would actually be done by the CIA and if it was possible. The results she found were something of a mixed bag because Tom Cruise and the filmmakers nailed a few aspects but the overall concept of the sequence was rather flawed.

This part is amusing because, ‘what if somebody looks out the window?’ If we were gonna have to do something like that, it’d be the window cleaning day, right? Or something, just like, there has to be a reason for him to be outside the window. Doing something like this in broad daylight with very complex tech is like, ‘okay so you couldn’t figure out how to like, turn him into the local janitor and get him into this space, right?’ It’s great theater but it doesn’t at all meet kind of how we think about trying to get into a closed facility.

Meyerriecks was more impressed by the moment in the scene where Cruise’s Ethan Hunt deals with his tech failing as he must pivot when his gloves stop working.

Sometimes, tech fails. I love that he’s got a Plan B because that’s exactly why we do mission rehearsal, particularly for things that are stressing like this than having brainstorms through the, ‘if this failed, what would you do?’ So that they’re not trying to solve it in real time. We have a principal called KISS, ‘keep it simple stupid,’ that you want to keep the tech as simple as possible, not because case officers are stupid but the more complex you make it, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. I’m gonna give it a 4/10 because the front end is really good, the back end is just something we wouldn’t contemplate. We would think about a different way to do that than just having him strung up on the side of a building in the middle of the day.

What This Means For Mission: Impossible

It Kind Of Captures What Works About The Series

For some movie series, it might be a bit damaging to find out that the stuff done on the big screen isn’t as realistic as you may believe. However, that’s not really the case with Mission: Impossible​​​​​​. Though there is a sense that the things Ethan Hunt does are plausible, the premise is often that he’s out there doing things that are next to impossible. While Dawn Meyerriecks was accurate in her analysis of the Burj Khalifa scene, it still works perfectly.

As she noted, “it’s theater,” and the audience is on the edge of their seat while the sequence happens. On top of that, though the setup for the moment is a bit off, we all know that it’s actually Tom Cruise doing these things, and while we know he ended up okay, there’s still something about it that adds tension to the scene. Mission: Impossible doesn’t need to be 100% accurate because of the setup of the franchise and how entertaining it is.