'Mission Impossible 7' Clip Breaks Down Train Scene

Mission: Impossible always goes for grander and grander heights. The 7th entry in the series is no different. Tom Cruise hasn't slowed down a bit even though he's getting older, and it really shows in one specific scene from the new film, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. Here’s the thing about heightening these movies though. They’re all about spectacle. You can’t just get bigger and better by being more dangerous. There’s a certain art to it.

The train scene in Dead Reckoning is an incredible example of that. As they explain in the featurette below, you can’t really just go out and buy a train with the intention of absolutely obliterating it. Since there’s such a huge emphasis on practical effects in the series, that only left one more option. They’d have to build a functioning train from the ground up. Not only would it need to look good on camera, but it would also have to function on rails. It’s a huge undertaking, and to make things more difficult, it's obviously extremely expensive.

In the featurette, Tom Cruise shares the following:

When we started talking about this movie in terms of a sense of adventure and action sequence on a train was something we know we always wanted to do. We wanted to build upon the previous films apply all of that knowledge to something practical and real.

Christopher McQuarrie, the film's director, explained “No one in the world is doing this level of practical filmmaking and it may never be done again.”

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One opens in theaters on July 12.